Teaching of Reading and Phonics

At Winterton Primary School and Nursery we follow the "Letters and Sounds" programme.  This is a 6 phase programme taught from Nursery through to Year 2.

Phase 1 (Nursery)

Begins in Nursery and continues throughout phases 2-6.  It includes speaking and listening activities focussing on sounds discrimination, rhythm and rhyme, alliteration, oral, segmenting and blending.

Phase 2 (Reception)

Introduces the letters and sounds (graphemes and phonemes) used to read simple words

Phase 3 (Reception)

Introduces digraphs (two letters that make one sound) eg: ch, sh, th, ng,ai, ee

Trigraphs (graphemes made up of three letters to represent a sound) eg: igh, ear, air, ure

Phase 4 (Reception)

Includes words with adjacent consonants eg: damp, blank.  Children are encouraged to blend sounds together fluently to read words.

Phase 5 (Year 1)

Children learn a final set of graphemes to read more complex words and learn alternate ways to spell the same sounds.

Children are taught using a range of strategies and resources to recognise sounds (phonemes) and letter (graphemes) in words both spoken and written forms.  They learn to blend and segment phonemes and graphemes to read and write words.  we use the online resources from Espresso Phonics and Phonics Play alongside practical resources to reach phonic lessons inability groups.

The core reading scheme we ise is Oxford Reading Tree which is structures to support a phonic approach, but we also supplement this with other phonic bases schemes including Phonic Bug and Big Cat Phonics.

We encourage the children to read daily at home and school.  The books give the children the opportunity to apply their phonic knowledge learned in lessons and improve their segmenting and blending skills.

Parents are encouraged to contribute to the ready records to enable dialogue between school and home.

Another important part of learning to read is to encourage a child's enthusiasm for books and developing their interests in authors and genres.  Listening to and talking about stories and non-fiction books is valuable in promoting early comprehension skills.

As the children process through the school, they become 'free readers' choosing their own books forming ideas about authors and genres and reading for pleasure.  Children read for pleasure daily in class from year 2-6.  Reading comprehension is taught as pare of the literacy lessons and guided reading is a feature of our teaching.