English

At Manadon Vale , we use the ‘No Nonsense Grammar and sentence toolkit’ so that grammar teaching links seamlessly with teaching children how to improve their writing.  This has had a positive impact on the children’s learning by putting the grammar teaching into a context and allowing the children to experiment with it within their own writing.  

Children are taught tools/ symbols that represent specific grammar content. This analogy helps them to understand the terminology as well as when and how to use it effectively.  

At Manadon Vale, our writing curriculum is designed to enable our children to become imaginative, engaging and precise writers who show control as well as adaptability in style when asked to write for a range of contexts, purposes and audiences. At the core of our curriculum is the belief that children should be taught using high quality texts that vary in genre, show cultural diversity and are matched to the needs of individual classes of children.  

By using this structure to shape our writing curriculum, the children are presented with a model which enables them to understand authors’ choices and intentions, demonstrating what an effective piece of writing looks like, as well as providing a solid understanding of grammar; this provides the children with clear end points and outcome pieces to work towards. Through teaching writing skills alongside these high-quality texts, children are shown how the choices that they make as a writer impact on the reader in differing ways.  

This curriculum is taught with a logical progression of texts so that children can build on their prior learning in a systematic way to ensure that intended knowledge and skills are acquired. 

At Manadon Vale , our pupils’ writing journey begins in the early years and sequentially builds knowledge and skills, year-on-year.   

A reader from Manadon Vale Primary School will be able to:  

• Read at an age expected standard.  
• Apply their phonics knowledge when reading as well as other strategies to identify unknown words. For example, reading around the word for meaning, breaking it up into parts etc.  
• Develop reading for pleasure that lasts a lifetime.  
• Experience a wide breath of books, including a range of genres and themes.  
• Understand a variety of text types including fiction, non-fiction and poetry.  
• Have a good understanding for a wide range of vocabulary.  
• Retrieve information from the text through skimming and scanning.  
• Read between the lines to make accurate inferences. 
  

All EYFS and KS1 will use the ELS programme to support their reading at school. Each child is matched with a book according to their ability and one book of the sounds they are learning each week. As the children transition to Year 2 and are confident with their decoding, blending and segmenting, they will move on to Accelerated Reader scheme.

Renaissance Accelerated Reader

Renaissance Accelerated Reader balances students' independent reading practice with nonfiction reading and close-reading skills practice. It is a computer-based program that schools may use to monitor reading practice and progress. It helps teachers guide children to books that are at their individual reading levels. 

Children ready for this scheme will be quizzed at 3 points in the year to answer a series of retrieval, prediction and inference skills. This will then point them to a ZPD ( Zone of Proximal development) so the children know which level reading books to read. They can read as many books as they like during the week and at the end of the book,  will take a short quiz to check if they've understood it.

Goals / targets are set using a child's ZPD level and the time provided for reading practice, this ensures each child's target is personalised and relevant to their individual ability in reading.