English at Clockhouse Primary School

“The more that you read the more things you will know, the more that you learn the more places you’ll go!”

- Dr. Seuss

Read on to find out all about English at Clockhouse!

Who leads English at Clockhouse?

My name is Mrs Jarvis and I am the English Leader at Clockhouse Primary School. I started at Clockhouse in 2016, having moved from a different school in Havering where I started my teaching career in 2011. As a child, I always enjoyed reading and had a vivid imagination but at times I found it difficult getting my ideas down onto paper. My reasoning was it was too hard and boring! When I began teaching, I had a passion for developing strategies to support children in bridging the gap between generating ideas and transferring this into their writing. Since starting at Clockhouse, I have helped develop a reading and writing curriculum that is exciting with oracy and key texts at the heart to ensure it is inclusive for all.

My name is Miss Cason and I am the English Co-Ordinator here at Clockhouse. I have been teaching at Clockhouse since 2015 and have loved every minute of it. Since joining, I became more and more enthusiastic about the learning and teaching of English. At school, I always found reading and writing hard and I was often was not engaged with lessons. From this, I wanted to help create an engaging and supportive curriculum which develops the love of learning for all children and to ensure that reading and writing was at the heart of their learning.

What is English all about at Clockhouse?

At Clockhouse we believe that reading and writing should be at the heart of the curriculum.

We use Jolly Phonics as our synthetic phonics approach, which allows all children to be exposed to the different sounds and ensures they achieve their potential. Our reading is underpinned by John Murray’s Reading Explorers where our shared reading approach is at the forefront of teaching different reading skills weekly whilst exposing children to new and exciting vocabulary.

At Clockhouse, we use high quality core texts to hook the children into their writing. Our curriculum follows the National Curriculum and is adaptable to meet the needs of all individual children. We use the techniques of ‘Talk for writing’ to support the writing process and develop speaking and listening skills.

Find out more about English at Clockhouse?

You might also like to know…

We are lucky to have such an amazing library at Clockhouse! It is beautifully painted with many fairytale characters making it an exciting and inviting place to read. We also have our very own resident librarian who is on hand to recommend books and share her love of reading with all. We also have junior librarians that support the librarian and share their love of reading with other children in the school.

We believe story telling is important and love to invite visitors into the school who are experts at story telling or are published authors.

Dressing up is one of our favourite things to do at Clockhouse! We love to celebrate World Book Day every March and dress up as our favourite characters (with each year group voting on their favourite costumes).

Every half term each year group has an Author in the Spotlight focus where we learn about a particular author and read stories that they have written. You can see who our Author in the Spotlight is by looking at our dedicated spotlight in each year group corridor.

At Clockhouse we know that reading not only supports children’s access to the curriculum but that it could also be their passport to better life chances and we intend that to be the case. Therefore, every class has story time daily which gives them a chance to listen and enjoy a story. In some classes, it is also an opportunity for children to practise their own fluency in reading by reading the class story to the class.

We try to implement Active Learning in all English lessons, as we believe it helps to develop children’s automaticity, one of the children’s favourite Active Learning activities is ‘Kung Fu Punctuation’.

Click on the link below to see English at Clockhouse in action: