English
Our Vision & Ethos
The English department at Budehaven strives to deliver an enriching and challenging curriculum which gives all students the opportunity to engage with a range of texts from different times and cultures. At the heart of our curriculum is knowledge, encouraging students to develop their own understanding of the world around them, past and present, creating opportunities which encourages critical thinking and independence.
The English 'Learning Journey'
English KS3/4/5 Handbook
english department handbook.pdf
Writing for pleasure
Writing for pleasure is key to keeping creativity alive, and pupils at Budehaven are encouraged to practice writing, building their writing stamina, speed and accuracy in dedicated writing lessons once a fortnight.
These are designed to explicitly teach grammatical skills and vocabulary, as well as develop writing for pleasure. Pupils have opportunities to explore writing in different genres and styles, experimenting with form and structure.
Over the years, there has been much debate about whether the explicit teaching of grammar is helpful when teaching students to write and punctuate accurately. Of course, an explicit understanding of grammar is not necessary to be able to write, per se, but the problem for many students is that they do not have a grasp of the constructs that underpin what makes a sentence complete or where punctuation is needed to clarify meaning. As a result, they mimic as best as they can, and exam papers across the country are littered with comma splices or full stops that are misplaced or entirely missing.
Our writing lessons use creative stimuli to inspire pupils, allowing them to discuss and share ideas. Pupils are given opportunities to consider how to improve sentence structures and punctuation in exemplar sentences, learn and incorporate new vocabulary into their writing and experiment with sentence types using David Didau’s 30 creative sentence types.
They will develop their grammatical understanding of writing using Lindsay Skinner’s ‘Crafting Brilliant sentences’ which breaks down writing into component parts to ensure pupils can master each skill.
‘Crafting Brilliant Sentences’ takes a knowledge-based approach and is split into two parts to reflect this:
- The first part of each chapter, ‘Understanding’, focuses on developing a knowledge of grammar
and teaches the students to identify and accurately use different grammatical features. - The second part of each chapter, ‘Crafting’, focuses on the application of this knowledge,
teaching the students ways to manipulate and craft their sentences.
The lessons are designed to allow the students to focus on mastering individual features to avoid
cognitive overload. Instead of only giving students a model of good writing to mimic, the lessons
focus on an individual feature of that writing and how that feature crafts meaning.
Detailed lesson plans including suggested answers are provided to guide your teaching. Each lesson
plan is supported by a PowerPoint with examples and whole-class activities for front-of-class discussion. Every lesson also has two accompanying resource sheets designed to be handed out for
students’ use: - Handouts contain further examples and activities for students to complete, working either on
their own or in pairs / small groups. - Intervention sheets outline key concepts and give the students further practice in using the
grammatical techniques and features covered.