At Moorside Academy our primary aim as educators is to ensure that our pupils are safe,happy and ready to learn. The ethos of our school is that the foundations are built firmly on peace and respect, regardless of an individual’s role in the academy. Our children and their families (community) are at the heart of everything that we do here at Moorside and our curriculum has been developed in partnership with our children to be stimulating and engaging and to promote a lifelong love of learning. Our nurturing approach ensures that our curriculum is fully inclusive for all learners and we work hard to challenge all of our children and develop in them the resilience that will accompany them on their future learning journey.’
At Moorside CP Academy, we have chosen to use Bug Club Phonics, a comprehensive teaching programme and DFE approved systematic synthetic phonics scheme. This scheme is used within our Reception class, Year 1 and Year 2.
The scheme follows a proven progression and research has found that children have made significantly more progress in reading than those not following the scheme. Not only has Bug Club been found to be successful academically for children, but it has also been shown to increase positive attitudes to reading and a great motivator for reluctant readers, boosting children’s confidence and enjoyment of reading right at the beginning of their reading journey.
The Bug Club Phonics programme follows the teaching sequence of letters and sounds and lessons are structured in the same way each day with an introduction, revisit, teach, practise and apply element to every session, providing the children with consistent routines that they can become familiar with. Our teachers at Moorside CP Academy implement a multi-sensory approach in the teaching and learning of phonics which enables the children to learn from visual, audio and kinesthetic activities. Throughout the programme, teachers supplement the provided materials to suit the needs of the children. This helps to secure essential phonic knowledge and skills as well as ensuring the lessons are fun, interactive and engaging.
We use the Bug Club Phonics decodable reading books that have been written specifically to match the order in which grapheme-phoneme correspondences are introduced in class. These books are fully decodable, which means that words in the book can be read using just the children’s developing phonics knowledge. For example, when the graphemes s, a, t, p, i, and n are taught at the beginning of phase 2, the children’s decodable books would contain words with these sounds within. Not only does this allow children to embed and secure their phonics knowledge, but it also allows them to experience success. This in turn builds their confidence, motivation and enthusiasm for reading.
