Phonics
At Ladygrove Park Primary, we aim for all our children to become fluent, confident readers who are passionate about reading. Children who read regularly, or are read to regularly, have the opportunity to open the doors to so many different worlds. More importantly, reading will give each child the tools to become independent life-long learners.
Children should:
- Learn the skills of blending and segmenting as a first priority as they are introduced to the grapheme/phoneme correspondences for reading and spelling. This ensures that from the outset children are able to read and spell simple Consonant Vowel Consonants with the Grapheme Phoneme Correspondences they know.
- Be reading with increasing automaticity by the age of 6.
- Apply their phonic knowledge in the context of reading and spelling in the wider curriculum and understand how and when to do this.
- Develop their spoken language and comprehension simultaneously as they are learning phonics in the first years of school.
- Use phonics as their first strategy to decode and encode unknown words until a degree of fluency is reached.
- Develop a love of books by reading daily, at home and at school.
- Be given access to a wide range of books at school and at home, both at their phonics level and aspirational.
Starting in Foundation Stage and continuing through Key Stage 1, we use Read Write Inc. - a lively, rigorous and daily phonics teaching programme, which helps pupils to learn the sounds and corresponding letters they need to read and write with fluency and confidence. This continues into Key Stage 2, for those children who may need phonics reinforcement, where spelling strategies become the main focus.
We begin by teaching children Set 1 Sounds, the first sounds that will enable them to blend sounds to read words (e.g. s/a/d blended together read as ‘sad’).
Children are first introduced to the sounds with images with a rhyme to support recall and letter formation. The children then begin reading stories and texts that have these sounds within them so that they are able to apply their phonic knowledge and develop reading fluency.
Whilst teaching the children to read the sounds, we are simultaneously teaching them to write and spell words that include these sounds, and then use them within short sentences.
As children conquer their sounds, we introduce the later sounds and the children read complementary texts to these with increasingly more complex sounds and graphemes (different ways of spelling the same sound /ee/ or /ea/). The children are shown that a sound can be written using 2, 3 or sometimes even 4 letters and they use these rules to spell words.
Click here to view our Link to Phonics Policy
Click here to view our Guide to Reading with your Child.