English

Autumn 1

Welcome to our English learning page!

This half term, we will be developing our reading, writing, grammar and vocabulary through the Pathways to Write unit Gorilla.

🦍 Our Core Text: Gorilla

We will explore a story about family, an absent father and a magical mountain gorilla. The story follows a girl who is given a teddy by her father. The teddy comes alive and takes her to the zoo.

We will explore themes including:

• Family and relationships
• Change and separation
• Magic and imagination
• Gorillas and zoos
• Feelings and emotions

This unit also links to our PSHE learning about change, transitions, loss and separation.

✍️ Our Writing

Our main writing outcome will be a fantasy story.

Children will develop their ability to:

• Create interesting descriptions
• Develop characters and settings
• Organise ideas into paragraphs
• Use adventurous and varied vocabulary
• Write from a character's point of view
• Use dialogue effectively

Children working at greater depth may retell the story from Dad's viewpoint or include speech.

🔤 Grammar & Writing Skills

During this unit we will be learning to:

• Expand noun phrases using adjectives, nouns and prepositional phrases.
• Choose nouns and pronouns carefully to avoid repetition.
• Use fronted adverbials.
• Organise paragraphs around a theme.
• Use commas after fronted adverbials.
• Use inverted commas for direct speech.

📖 Reading

Our class reader is:

The Railway Children – Edith Nesbit

We will continue to develop our reading skills through discussion, vocabulary exploration and reading a range of fiction, poetry and non-fiction.

📝 Poetry

During assessment week, we will explore:

The Lost-Lost Property Office

Children will create a group list poem based on the original poem and perform it.

We will also develop our use of:

• Interesting nouns, adjectives, adverbs and verbs
• Alliteration
• Hyperbole
• Repeating patterns
• Simple poetic forms