English Skills Teacher's Guide

Schofield & Sims English Skills provides regular graded practice to develop pupils’ literacy skills at Key Stage 2. Fully in line with the requirements of the National Curriculum for English, the series comprises seven pupil books, seven accompanying answer books and a single teacher’s guide. Key areas are constantly revisited, giving pupils the intensive and rigorous practice that is essential to embed learning and prepare for the Key Stage 2 national tests. 

The English Skills Teacher’s Guide introduces the series and provides suggestions for how the pupil books may be used, both at home and in school. It contains two sets of resources: Assessment resources and General resources.

The Assessment resources include two double-page Entry tests to help you assess what level each pupil is working at and set differentiated work for different abilities within a class or group. An Entry test marking key provides answers to all the questions in each Entry test and results can be noted in the accompanying Group record sheet. For those pupils who are struggling to meet age-related expectations, additional Diagnostic checks with supporting Activity prompts allow you to determine the exact nature of a pupil’s difficulties and provide strategies to help them improve.

The General resources section includes a selection of photocopiable resources designed to help pupils in their independent writing and as they work through the tests. These include:

• Spelling wall and Learn to spell a word photocopiables to help pupils to remember tricky spellings
• Word class wheel and Sentence trail photocopiables to help pupils with grammar terms and sentence construction
• two Punctuation prompts to remind pupils to check their punctuation
• Word collector and Dictionary work photocopiables to help pupils retain new vocabulary
• a Writer’s toolbox photocopiable and Proofreading checklist to help with the Writing and Proofreading tasks in the pupil books.