United Kingdom · National Curriculum Attainment Targets
Year 1 English
A comprehensive literacy curriculum designed to transition students from phonological awareness to expressive storytelling and analytical reading. Students explore various text types while developing the mechanical skills necessary for independent writing and fluent reading.
The Magic of Phonics and Word Building
Students master the relationship between sounds and letters to decode unfamiliar words and build a strong foundation for reading fluency.
Focusing on GPCs (grapheme-phoneme correspondences) to blend sounds into words.
Identifying and reading high-frequency words that do not follow standard phonetic rules.
Encoding sounds into written graphemes and practicing letter formation.
Storytellers and Dreamers
An introduction to narrative structures through traditional tales and contemporary picture books.
Exploring how authors use words and illustrations to show what a character is like.
Identifying where and when stories take place and how settings affect the plot.
Understanding the beginning, middle, and end of stories to build comprehension.
Fact Finders and Information Seekers
Exploring non-fiction texts to understand how information is organized and presented.
Identifying labels, captions, headings, and diagrams in information books.
Practicing concise writing to describe real-world objects and events.
Using texts to find specific information and developing inquiry skills.
Rhythm, Rhyme, and Word Play
Engaging with poetry and performance to develop an ear for language and oral expression.
Identifying rhyme and alliteration in simple poems and nursery rhymes.
Using voice and gesture to recite poems and share stories with an audience.
Collaborating to create original rhymes based on familiar structures.
Sentences with Style
Developing the grammatical awareness to construct meaningful and punctuated sentences.
Learning to use capital letters, full stops, and question marks consistently.
Using the conjunction 'and' to join words and clauses.
Expanding vocabulary by using descriptive words for people, places, and things.
Becoming an Author
Synthesizing skills to plan, write, and edit a short independent narrative.
Using story maps and talk-for-writing to organize narrative ideas.
Orally rehearsing sentences before writing them down independently.
Reading writing aloud to check for sense and basic errors.