Key Stage 2 English at St Mary’s – The Literacy Tree Curriculum

Literacy Tree is a complete, book-based platform for key stage 2 that covers all requirements of the English curriculum. The books chosen help children at St Mary’s to grow ideas and expand their minds.

It starts at the roots. Literacy Tree provides book-based planning sequences, Writing Roots, which embed all aspects of the literacy curriculum and engage our children to write with clarity and purpose.

We grow literary knowledge through Literary Leaves. This is where a range of sequenced activities take children through whole books to teach reading comprehension and create critical readers. Literary Leaves uses a real variety of resources from novels, poetry collections and high-quality, non-fiction books that connect to the Writing Roots through Literary Themes.

Key Stage 3 English at St Mary's 

The Key Stage 3 English curriculum at St Mary’s is designed to equip our students with the essential skills they need in order to communicate effectively through reading, writing, listening and speaking.  It is designed to build on the knowledge and skills developed by our Literacy Tree curriculum at Key Stage 2. 

We want children to be readers who are: capable, fluent and possess a wide vocabulary, to enable them to find meaning in challenging prose and verse independently.  We strive to foster a love of reading in our pupils, with the staff modelling their own passion and enthusiasm for literature and the careful, deliberate choices of texts, chosen to inspire another generation to read.  Our reading spine is deliberately designed to expose the students to as wide a variety of cultures, backgrounds and religions as possible.

By the end of Year 8, each child should be able to read an unseen text and identify its genre/context; read whole novels/plays, while building an understanding of the plot, characters and themes and make links to other texts they have studied.  They need to be able to identify literary techniques, understand their effect and explain how/why they have been used.  They also need to support their ideas with specific evidence from the text, including the use of quotations.

We want our children to be confident writers, able to adapt their writing style and content to suit the context, plan their ideas logically in a sequence, choose vocabulary deliberately for impact, use punctuation accurately and for effect and finally, be able to proofread and edit their own written work independently.  

During their time at St Mary's, we encourage our students to move on from simple turn-taking during class discussions, to true listening - responding to each other’s input, elaborating on each other’s ideas, as well as appreciating others’ points of view, even if it conflicts with their own. 

Finally, we value oracy - we want our students to have the confidence to give presentations and answer questions on a chosen topic, having researched and rehearsed beforehand; to take part in debates with conviction, whether they are adopting a genuine or a given opinion.