English

English at Northway is about equipping pupils with the knowledge, skills and understanding to be able to communicate effectively in the world. The Curriculum has been designed to inspire children to read a wealth of high quality texts and be inspired to write for real purpose.

At Northway, we use a quality text approach to the teaching of English.

  • The Quality Text Approach approach aims to engage and motivate children in their literacy learning.
  • The Quality Text Approach enables children to deepen their understanding of texts and provides a meaningful context for writing.
  • The Quality Texts Approach brings together the three areas of English: GPS, Reading and Writing and provides an invaluable context for children to build their knowledge and cultural capital.

Grammar, Punctuation and Spelling

Spelling Shed

For Spelling we use Spelling Shed, supplemented by activities from the School Improvement Liverpool Spelling Toolkit.

The Spelling Shed – proudly powered by EdShed – is a spelling platform designed by a team of Primary School teachers. It is built with primary school students, teachers and parents in mind and aims to make spelling fun for students as well as simple for teachers to manage.

Spelling Shed includes:

  • A whole-school spelling scheme, giving 100% coverage of the National Curriculum.
  • The ability to create unlimited custom lists and search for others’ lists within the platform.
  • A tablet and mobile game for students to use to practise spelling.
  • An online game, which gives access to our platform on all current desktop, laptop, tablet and mobile devices.
  • A teacher hub, which allows simple management of student records, teachers and classes.
  • The ability to set and monitor homework assignments for e.g. weekly spelling lists.
  • Whole-class Hive games that allow all pupils to play alongside each other as an alternative for a weekly spelling test.

Our platform can be used as a complete whole-school spelling solution. Our scheme gives weekly lists and activities, assignments provide targeted practice through our app / online game and Hive games provide a weekly whole-class spelling test.

Read, Write Inc. Phonics Programme

Learning to read is the most important skill your child will learn at Northway. Everything else depends on it, so we put as much energy as we possibly can into making sure that every single child learns to read as quickly as possible.
We want your child to love reading – and to want to read for themselves. This is why we put our efforts into making sure they develop a love of books as well as simply learning to read.

Handwriting at Northway

To help teach handwriting, school uses the Letter-join handwriting programme.  As part of the school’s subscription parents and carers can access Letter-joinfor free to help children practise at home.

The guide below shows how to use Letter-join’s key resources for home learning.