Reading & Phonics

Phonics at Manor Primary School

At Manor Primary School, we teach a high quality, daily, discrete spelling session from Foundation to Year 6. Primarily, we follow the National Curriculum and 'Letters and Sounds' document to intergrate learning multi-sensory and to provide consistency throughout the year groups.

The children are assessed half termly to track their progress and ensure that good progress is being made through the 'phases' to ensure that they meet the required standard.

We provide workshops to support parents and provide them with information and activities to help their child at home.

From June 2012, year one children are formally assessed by an unseen government test and results are reported to parents. It is a decoding test using 'real and non-real' words.

Reading at Manor Primary School

Learning to read is complex yet essential for all our children's life chances. Reading relies on us learning many different cues such as:

• structure - how sentences are formed, grammar & syntax;
• meaning - it relies on us having an understanding of the world around us to make meaning (semantic cues);
• Pictorial - we need to know about illustrations, graphs, pictures, captions and headings (bibliographic cues) and 
• graphophonic cues - those supplied by spelling and presentation of words, which interact with knowledge of words and phonic analysis.

Children read in as many situations as possible, not just in reading lessons. Reading takes place in all lessons.

Children read individually to their teacher during Everyone Reading In Class time. This happens daily and when children are not reading on a 1-to-1 they are encouraged to read widely for pleasure and purpose.  All children visit the local library regularly to choose a book of their choice.  Each pupil from Year 2 to Year 6 has an individual box of books to ensure breadth of genre.

Reading Schemes

We use a variety of reading scheme texts to ensure children learn and apply a range of reading strategies. We endeavour to purchase/provide books/texts that engage boys and girls and their interests.

Our book organisation system includes a coloured band which correspond to reading levels. Each level has carefully chosen words, phrases, phonics, and comprehension.

Parents are encouraged to hear their child read at least three times per week as a minimum and return their reading bag and log to school.

Pupils have a range of schemes to help them develop their reading skills.  Our main scheme 'Phonics Bug' this is phonic based and pupils are given books according to their phonic ability.  

Children in Key Stage 1 and Foundation Stage also have access to Rigby Star and Oxford Reading Tree. Children in Key Stage 2 have access to Oxford Reading Tree and Literacy World.