Phonics Teaching

At St Stephens, we aim for all children to learn to read with fluency and comprehension, regardless of their background, needs and abilities. We recognise that the ability to read with fluency and comprehension enriches children’s lives, underpins their academic progress in primary school and prepares them for secondary school and beyond. We also recognise that reading supports effective and accurate writing and is integrated throughout the curriculum.

At the beginning of the pupils’ journey in the Foundation Stage, we teach early reading skills by providing a systematic programme of reading which involves a combination of shared, guided, and individual reading. We aim to develop a reciprocal and interactive community of readers, fully involving parents and carers in supporting their child’s reading development. We aim to develop an appreciation of a wide variety of literature from English and other cultures. We believe that it is important for children to hear stories read aloud to them, to engage in making preferences about books, and to build vocabulary of the written word.

Phonics

At St Stephens we use the RWInc scheme (Read Write Inc.) for the teaching of phonics. Daily lessons are delivered to small groups of children who are assessed to be accessing the correct part of the programme. The emphasis is on teachers modelling the correct sounds and providing practise time. Reading books that are sent home, match the sounds being taught in class. The lessons are fast-paced and develop fluency of recognition of phoneme/grapheme correspondence. Children are assessed on a half-termly basis and move groups according to their outcomes, ensuring they are accessing their next learning steps. Children who are identified as falling behind receive support to catch-up.

How will children be taught to read?

We start by teaching phonics to the children in our Foundation class from their first day in school. This means that they learn how to ‘read’ the sounds in words and how those sounds can be written down. This is essential for reading, but it also helps children learn to spell well. We teach the children simple ways of remembering these sounds and letters. We suggest that you ask them to show you what these are.

The children also practise reading (and spelling) what we call ‘tricky words’, such as ‘one,’ ‘have,’ ‘said’ and ‘where’.

The children practise their reading with books that match the phonics and the ‘tricky words’ they know. They start thinking that they can read and this does wonders for their confidence.

The teachers read a range of books with embedded diversity to the children too so that they get to know all sorts of stories, poetry and information books. They learn many more words this way and it also helps their writing.

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The following video shows the correct pronunciations for the sounds. This includes single letter sounds and 'special friends' - sounds with two or more letters. It is vital that children learn to say the sounds correctly.

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Read Write Inc have produced two helpful booklets for how to help at home. Booklet 1 tells you how to:

help your child blend sounds into words,
read the blending books,
read Red, Green and Purple story books

RWI reading at home booklet 1.pdf

Booklet 2 tell you how to help your child practise reading:

Set 2 and Set 3 sounds,
Pink, Orange, Yellow, Blue and Grey Storybooks.

RWI reading at home booklet 2.pdf

The rhymes we use to support handwriting in Foundation, Year 1 and Year 2 can be found below. When your child is learning single letter sounds, these are the rhymes we use for print:

handwriting_phrases_v2.pdf