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Early Reading & Phonics
At Whitley Lodge First School reading is central to our curriculum. Our Reading provision aims to provide pupils with the skills and knowledge necessary to read fluently and confidently while developing a love of reading that allows pupils to draw on knowledge of the world around them.
Our children progressively learn a range of key skills in reading using a variety of different strategies:
- Word reading – systematic phonics, learning GPC (Grapheme Phoneme Correspondence), developing skill of blending, sharing high quality texts, developing fluency
- Comprehension – drawing on linguistic knowledge and on knowledge of the world, read widely across a range of genres, develop a love of reading, increase pupils’ vocabulary, develop reading for pleasure
- Curriculum links – All pupils are encouraged to read widely across both fiction and non-fiction to gain information and knowledge develop their knowledge of the world in which they live, to establish an appreciation and love of reading, and to gain knowledge across the curriculum.
Teachers have carefully planned out the books that they are teaching and reading with their children across the year in order to expose children to a variety of books and authors.
At Whitley Lodge children’s reading begins in Nursery. Children are immersed in a wide range of reading experiences to develop a love of stories, rhymes and songs.
Phonics
Nursery concentrate on developing children’s speaking and listening skills and ensuring the children are attuned to the sounds around them by covering the following:
- General sound discrimination to raise children’s awareness of the sounds around them and to develop their listening skills.
- General sound discrimination – instrumental sounds to develop children’s awareness of sounds made by various instruments and noise makers.
- General sound discrimination – body percussion to develop children’s awareness of sounds and rhythms.
- Rhythm and rhyme to develop children’s appreciation and experiences of rhythm and rhyme in speech.
- Alliteration, the focus is on initial sounds of words, with activities including I-Spy type games and matching objects which begin with the same sound.
- Voice sounds to distinguish between different vocal sounds and to begin oral blending and segmenting.
- Oral blending and segmenting to develop oral blending and segmenting skills.
In Reception and Year One children complete the Read Write Inc phonics programme. Using synthetic phonics, children quickly learn to blend letter sounds together following a fun and effective programme. Phonics provides children with the building blocks needed to become successful readers.
Why do we use RWI? The RWI programme has been proven to be a very successful method of teaching every child to read and write using phonics. Children are assessed and are put into groups and given the appropriate RWI sounds to learn, sound blending and reading books to follow matched to their phonic knowledge. Each week children will take home a RWI story book which is matched to their phonic ability.
What do children learn in RWI? In Reception and Key Stage One we develop children’s phonics knowledge through the RWI scheme. The children learn Set 1 “special friends” sounds e.g. sh, ch, Set 2 and 3 sounds, which enable them to read and write a range of words. Children learn different representations of a sound (‘graphemes’), for example ay, a-e, ai. This enables children to become more confident with not only their reading, but also spelling and develops skills which are transferable to their Literacy.
Children are grouped according to ability for daily phonics lessons. Each session is broken up into different parts including: revision of previous sounds taught, teaching of a new sound, reading words with the new sound and writing them, reading and writing about a core storybook matched to their phonic ability. The children are encouraged to use these sounds to support their writing in all lessons across the curriculum.
