English

Autumn Term 1 2025

This half term, we will be using the texts "Young, Gifted and Black" by Jamia Wilson to explore Black History. Our final outcome will be a series of diary entries, making use of descriptive language, fronted adverbials and paragraphs to organise our writing.

In our Guided Reading sessions, we will be focusing on the text - "The Place for Me - Stories of the Windrush Generation". This will allow us to develop our skills of prediction, summarising and inference. 

Author of the Term - Greg James and Chris Smith

GREG JAMES AND CHRIS SMITH are the multi-award-wining and bestselling authors of The Great Dream Robbery, Super Ghost and the Kid Normal series. They have been translated into over 20 languages and been shortlisted for both the Waterstones Children’s Book Prize and the Laugh Out Loud Award. Greg and Chris have championed children’s books widely, were judges for the Blue Peter Book Award in 2017 and were official World Book Day authors in 2020. Greg James is a radio and television broadcaster and Chris Smith a solo author of acclaimed children’s books Frankie Best Hates Quests and Clarity Jones and the Magical Detective Agency.

We will be reading Kid Normal as our class novel in the Autumn Term

Autumn Term 1 2024

We will be using the text "Queen of the Falls" by Chris Van Allsburg to drive our writing this half term. This is an exciting and fascinating real life story of one woman's determination to go over Niagara Falls in a barrel! This high quality text will inspire us to write diary entries, descriptive writing and even Instagram posts around the theme of daredevils. 

Our Guided Reading sessions will use the text "Goodnight Stories for Rebel Girls" by Elena Favilli and Francesca Cavallo. This will link in with our writing and provide us with the opportunity to develop our prediction, retrieval and inference skils. 

Autumn Term 2 2024

We will be using the text "Star of Fear, Star of Hope" by Jo Hoestlandt to drive our writing this half term. Our final outcome will be a flashback narrative based on the structure of this powerful and moving book.

In our Guided Reading sessions, we will be reading the book "When We Were Warriors" by Emma Carroll. This book contains three stories all set during World War 2, which will feed into our written work and our topic sessions this half term. 

Guided Reading in action!

Spring Term 1 2025

This half term we are using the text Arthur and the Golden Rope by Joe Todd Stanton. This book is set in Viking lands and is full of exciting characters from Norse mythology. We will be developing our skills with expanded noun phrases, relative clauses, fronted adverbials and dialogue as we work towards writing our own Norse myths. 

In our Guided Reading sessions, we will be reading Odd and the Frost Giants by Neil Gaiman. This will support our learning in English as it is another myth set in Norse lands involving a range of exciting characters. 

Summer Term 2025

Our main texts this term will be SkyChasers by Emma Carroll and Radiant Child by Javaka Steptoe. When studying SkyChasers, we will be writing a chapter of the narrative in the style of the author. For Radiant Child, we will produce a biographical text on the life and work of the artist Jean-Michel Basquiat.