Ashford Park is a large, increasingly diverse, three form entry primary school located close to Heathrow Airport, right on the edge of Surrey. Our vision of ‘Inspiring a love for life-long learning’ is at the heart of everything that we do at Ashford Park as we are dedicated to preparing all of our pupils to be successful and active citizens of the ever-changing world around us.
We are extremely proud of the Ashford Park curriculum, which is aspirational and challenging for all of our pupils. It has been carefully planned for our children and their future, with carefully consideration of their local community. With this in mind, we researched numerous approaches to writing, in our journey to find an approach which aligned closely with our core values and reflected the ambitions we have for all of our children. Most importantly we wanted quality texts that would inspire a lifelong love for both reading and writing to be central to our English curriculum. Literacy Tree offered all of these things and much more!
We are now in our third year of implementing the Literacy Tree Writing Roots, Literary Leaves and Spelling Seeds and we have seen our writing and reading outcomes go from strength to strength. We are extremely proud of the fact that our children experience the works of over 100 significant authors during their time with us. We aspire for our children to be empathic, independent thinkers who challenge stereotypes and celebrate diversity. The books selected by Literacy Tree have very much been chosen with this in mind. Our children have been lucky enough to participate in some wonderful hooks including a circus event, an alien crashing on our school site, a mysterious body outline in the school playground and many more! These are experiences our children will never forget. They have generated enthusiasm, curiosity, excitement and a real reason for writing.
As grammar, spelling and punctuation objectives are taught within the context of the books studied, our children understand how the grammatical elements to writing enhance meaning. They use terms such as ‘the subjunctive form’ and ‘progressive tense’ with a confidence that never ceases to amaze us. We have had the privilege to see our children grow in confidence as both readers and writers. They write confidently for both real and creative purposes producing amazing written outcomes as a direct result of engaging so well with carefully written, accessible and easily adaptable planning sequences.
Literacy Tree has not only been inspirational for our students but has also had a huge impact in developing our teacher’s subject knowledge and skills. All staff have engaged in Literacy Tree CPD with the amazing Pippa whose enthusiasm and knowledge of literature have inspired us with a real joy for the learning that can be derived from a quality text. The quality CPD we have received has been fundamental to the success of the Literacy Tree at APPS and we would thoroughly recommend working alongside one of their incredible consultants.
Mel Wootton
Assistant Head and English Lead
KS: Lower KS2
Year Group: Year 4
