Reading and Phonics

At St Peter’s and St Gildas’, it is our intention that all children become successful, fluent readers by the end of Key Stage One and believe this is achievable through a combination of strong, high quality, discrete phonics teaching combined with an approach that promotes a ‘Reading for Pleasure’ culture. We believe reading is a vital life skill that supports children’s learning across the curriculum. We continually strive to create a reading rich environment and aim for all our children to develop the habit of reading widely and often with both confidence and independence.

There is a genuine love of reading in our school. Through access to the wonders of quality texts, we aim to build on a love for reading and a passion for discovery.This is encouraged through sharing stories, poetry and information, inviting book corners and our well-resourced school library,

We follow the Little Wandle revised Letters and Sounds programme to teach phonics in Early Years and Key Stage 1

In Reception, children are taught letter sounds in groups, alongside ‘tricky’ common words, so they are able to begin to read and write short words and sentences. Children start Year 1 with a good knowledge of one way to write each of the 44 sounds, and are then taught other common ways to write each sound. They continue to develop their knowledge of common words and begin to read longer words and texts.

In the Summer term of Year 1, children take the Phonics Screening Check, a list of 40 real and pseudo words. This is intended to assess whether they have achieved a secure level of knowledge and understanding of the phonics they have been taught and allows us to see which children require further support with phonics in Year 2.

Guided reading takes place daily in Reception and Key Stage 1. We use the Book Band system to ensure children are reading a book that reflects their reading ability, and they are able to show their understanding of what they have read through answering questions with an adult. Through Guided Reading, children practise decoding as well as skills such as retrieval, clarifying meaning of new words, inference, prediction and sequencing, as well as learning about the features of different text types.

Each week, children are given a banded book in line with the sounds they have learnt in class that they should be able to read themselves, as well as choice books from the class book corner and/or school library, to encourage an enjoyment of reading at home. We believe this sets them off on a path for a lifetime of reading pleasure.

In Year 2 and KS2 the children focus on a range of strategies to help them when they are reading. These include clarifying new vocabulary, inferring, predicting, evaluating and making connections to other stories they have read or heard. Through Guided Reading, the children develop their speaking and listening skills, which is a valuable life skill and positively impacts on all other areas of their learning. Additionally, the teacher works with each child individually throughout the week to ensure that they are also working on expression and intonation.

Writing

In Key Stage 1 we aim to develop competent and confident writers who are willing to be resilient and have a go. We want the children to see the value of writing and find pleasure and reward in the process of learning to write. We understand that the development of early oracy and fine-motor skills, alongside exposure to stories and texts have a fundamental impact on a child’s growth as a writer. Our curriculum is therefore shaped by exciting, carefully considered texts and the development of vocabulary.  Before we have quality writers, we need quality talkers and storytellers.  By teaching English in this way, the children are immersed in the story they are learning. In turn, this improves their writing as the children build their vocabulary and understand the characters in more depth. Our units of work are from the programme Power of Reading and encompass all areas of the English curriculum. The children are given many opportunities to develop their speaking and listening skills daily.

Writing is a complex skill to master with many elements. We are eager for our children to be creative writers as well as technically adept. Children are encouraged to write for different purposes and audiences and are taught to edit and refine their work. We want our children to strive for their writing to reflect good language skills as well as neat, carefully presented work that they can be proud of. SPAG is embedded in each unit, as well as lessons  taught discretely.