English

Intent

English at Manor is about immersing children in reading and writing, taking them on a journey of learning, which provides them with rich and purposeful learning opportunities. At Manor, we want our children to develop a love of reading and use this to ensure that all children leave our school as skilled and passionate speakers, readers and writers. This will provide our pupils with firm foundations which support them as they become independent learners who can access all areas of the curriculum, and continue to apply this in academic studies for their future endeavours.

Implication

Integrated within the curriculum, high quality texts lead the children’s learning to provide an exciting, engaging learning experience where all children are able to succeed.

Careful text choices are made to ensure that all children experience a rich, wide and varied reading and writing diet on their journey through the school. All children will explore a range of different high quality class texts, written by varied writers and set in different cultures and historical periods, promoting and embracing equality and diversity. These are tracked through year group overviews to ensure these texts are built on progressively. In addition to this, teachers ensure that a wide range of genres are explored including fiction, non-fiction and poetry on a termly basis, making many links to the children’s Learning Journeys.

Learning environments are key to ensuring children are deeply immersed in this rich learning experience. Working Walls are used in each classroom to guide and aid our pupils’ through the learning process. Careful consideration and teaching of the different tiers of vocabulary provided in each text, promotes and encourages a greater use of higher level word choice for all children, exposing this vocabulary to the most disadvantaged children and challenging and extending the thinking of our most able. This vocabulary is displayed in the classroom to help all children to master applying fantastic language in their own writing.

Reading is an integral part of the curriculum at Manor. All children will be taught to develop their language comprehension and word recognition skills, ensuring progression through consistent practice across the key stages. Regular Guided Practice sessions ensure word recognition is taught progressively using ROPES skills, whilst VIPERS are used to deepen children’s language comprehension, and many opportunities are provided for children to apply their reading into their own writing. Reading environments are a welcoming space to instil a passion for reading. All staff at Manor, as well as parents and carers, play a part in developing our children as skilled, confident and life-long readers.

The importance of speaking and communicating is widely recognised at Manor as enabling children to explore their ideas as a writer. Grammar learning opportunities are carefully planned for and applied frequently in reading into writing activities from the key text being studied. Teachers’ modelling supports children with the writing process and exposes children to the thinking process of a writer. Handwriting and spelling is taught in small regular discrete sessions, but expectations for application are also shared frequently during the modelling process encouraging children to help build their writing fluency.

Impact

Pupils at Manor will make good or better progress from their starting points to achieve their full potential. Appropriate modelling and scaffolding will mean all pupils of all abilities will be able to succeed in all English lessons. They will leave primary school being confident and skilled speakers, readers and writers.

Children will be able to read for both pleasure and to further their learning. They will use their own experiences of reading as well as the class text to become skilled and confident writers. They will be able to write at length and explore how to use language to engage their own reader through adventurous word choices. Children will be able to read and write for different purposes and audiences, and will enjoy applying this across a range of different genres.

Progression of Skills

National Curriculum Content

At Manor, we use the 21 Steps from Kent to ensure our children receive timely learning in small steps. This ensures children complete their program of study for the year and allows for further challenge and support to be planned for.

Overviews

Please see our yearly overviews to find out about more about the rich learning experiences linked to high quality texts in each year group.

Book Recommendations

Please see our Book Lists recommending quality reads for children in each year group. These

can also be found in the back of your child’s reading diary. We hope you enjoy these

wonderful reads!

Phonics

This year, we have adopted the scheme Supersonic Phonic Friends to support our teaching and learning in Phonics. This scheme is based on the original Letters and Sounds with 6 phases of learning. It is a fully systematic synthetic phonics approach which is created by and beautifully designed by the phonics expert Anna Lucas and artist Fiona Cameron. The programme begins with Firm Foundations which aligns with Phase 1. The Basics Phonics 2, 3 and 4 will be taught during Foundation Stage and Year 1.The Higher Levels 5 will be taught throughout Year 1, and revised at the beginning of Year 2.

Please see the links for more details below.