READING AND THE IMPORTANCE OF PHONICS
At Wild Bank Primary School, we believe that reading is the key to success, underpins children's access to the curriculum and clearly impacts on their achievement. To be able to read, children need to be taught an efficient strategy to decode words. That strategy is phonics. Phonic decoding skills must be practised until children become automatic and fluent reading is established.
First Class Phonics is a complete systematic synthetic phonics programme (SSP) and it is the programme that we have adopted at Wild Bank Primary School.
We prioritise the teaching of phonics; we teach phonics daily in Nursery, Reception, Year 1 and Year 2. It is vitally important that children review and revisit grapheme phoneme correspondences (GPCs) and words, daily, weekly and across terms and years, in order to move this knowledge into the children's long-term memory. Our consistent approach to phonics ensures that children are given the best possible foundation for reading, writing and language skills.
To find out more about the scheme we use, click on the link below:
https://bced.co.uk/firstclassphonics/
Children need to learn to read as quickly and reasonably as possible, so that they can move from learning to read, to reading to learn, giving them access to a wealth of reading material to enhance their knowledge and enjoyment. Our expectations of progression are aspirational yet achievable; children who are not keeping up with their peers are given additional practise through keep-up sessions.
Children enjoy a range of multi-sensory resources to support their phonics learning. On-going assessment of children's progress takes place and the books children read in school and take home to read are decodable and matched to children's secure phonics knowledge. As well as decodable books, children take home a non-decodable book for sharing that can be either read to or with them. These books play an essential role in developing a love of reading; an important distinction is that these books are being shared with the children, but they are using phonically decodable books to practise their independent reading.
Due to the demands of the curriculum we are working on fluency of reading and also developing a deeper understanding of what we have read. The children will develop these skills in whole class reading sessions using new resources and training to support this.
At Wild Bank Primary School reading underpins everything that we do. Children are encouraged to read in all aspects of the curriculum and for their own pleasure. We encourage adults and children to share this love for reading. Parents play a vital role in this when supporting children's reading at home. We share with parents the importance of reading at home and how they can support their children. We have also shared ideas with parents about commenting in reading diaries and how they can extend their child's learning.
All children will read individually with members of staff and have daily whole class reading sessions. Children will also have the opportunity to select books from our library, use Reading Plus+ and other online resources to support reading. Teachers read the class novel to all children every day to ignite their love of books.
