Below is the minimum content for Language and Literacy(KS2 English) in the Northern Ireland Key Stage 2 Curriculum. The Curriculum Minimum Content is the skills, understanding and overall level of knowledge to be developed in each area.
The points below should give you an outline of what skills are expected from your child in Key Stage 2. This is what the AQE and PPTC Northern Ireland Transfer Tests will be based on.
TALKING AND LISTENING
Pupils should be enabled to:
- listen and respond to a range of fiction, poetry, drama and media texts through the use of traditional and digital resources;
- tell, re-tell and interpret stories based on memories, personal experiences, literature, imagination and the content of the curriculum;
- participate in group and class discussions for a variety of curricular purposes;
- know, understand and use the conventions of group discussion;
- share, respond to and evaluate ideas, arguments and points of view and use evidence or reason to justify opinions, actions or proposals;
- formulate, give and respond to guidance, directions and instructions;
- participate in a range of drama activities across the curriculum;
- improvise a scene based on experience, imagination, literature, media and/or curricular topics;
- describe and talk about real experiences and imaginary situations and about people, places, events and artefacts;
- prepare and give a short oral presentation to a familiar group, showing an awareness of audience and including the use of multimedia presentations;
- identify and ask appropriate questions to seek information, views and feelings;
- talk with people in a variety of formal and informal situations;
- use appropriate quality of speech and voice, speaking audibly and varying register, according to the purpose and audience;
- read aloud, inflecting appropriately, to express thoughts and feelings and emphasise the meaning of what they have read;
- recognise and discuss features of spoken language, including formal and informal language, dialect and colloquial speech.
READING
Pupils should be enabled to:
- participate in modelled, shared, paired and guided reading experiences;
- read, explore, understand and make use of a wide range of traditional and digital texts;
- engage in sustained, independent and silent reading for enjoyment and information;
- extend the range of their reading and develop their own preferences;
- use traditional and digital sources to locate, select, evaluate and communicate information relevant for a particular task;
- represent their understanding of texts in a range of ways, including visual, oral, dramatic and digital;
- consider, interpret and discuss texts, exploring the ways in which language can be manipulated in order to affect the reader or engage attention;
- begin to be aware of how different media present information, ideas and events in different ways;
- justify their responses logically, by inference, deduction and/or reference to evidence within the text;
- reconsider their initial response to texts in the light of insight and information which emerge subsequently from their reading;
- read aloud to the class or teacher from prepared texts, including those composed by themselves, using inflection to assist meaning;
- use a range of cross-checking strategies to read unfamiliar words in texts;
- use a variety of reading skills for different reading purposes.
WRITING
Pupils should be enabled to:
- participate in modelled, shared, guided and independent writing, including composing onscreen;
- discuss various features of layout in texts and apply these, as appropriate, within their own writing;
- experiment with rhymes, rhythms, verse structure and all kinds of word play and dialect;
- write for a variety of purposes and audiences, selecting, planning and using appropriate style and form;
- use the skills of planning, revising and redrafting to improve their writing, including that which they have composed digitally;
- express thoughts, feelings and opinions in imaginative and factual writing;
- use a variety of stylistic features to create mood and effect;
- begin to formulate their own personal style;
- create, organise, refine and present ideas using traditional and digital means, combining text, sound or graphics;
- understand the differences between spoken and written language;
- use a variety of skills to spell words correctly;
- develop increasing competence in the use of grammar and punctuation to create clarity of meaning;
- develop a swift and legible style of handwriting.
