Children in Reception and Key Stage 1 follow the synthetic phonics approach, using the “Read Write Inc.” programme. It’s an approach to teaching phonics in which individual letter sounds are taught and blended to form sounds and words. Read Write Inc. teaches sounds in Set 1 and 2 before moving on to the more complex sounds in Set 3. When moving onto a new set, children are expected to apply their skills and knowledge from previous learning. Once children are confident in blending the sounds to make words, phonetic, easily decodable books are introduced into Read Write Inc. lessons. Although, there is a much wider variety of texts used in the teaching of reading as a whole. Please come along to our parents workshops to help you to understand this more fully and see how you can help your child at home.
The children’s phonics skills help them to access Reading and Writing activities more confidently. At St. Elizabeth’s we place great importance on children learning to read and we use a combination of reading schemes to ensure they get access to a wide range of texts.
In Key Stage 1 and 2, we use books from a range of published schemes which we have banded according to the level of difficulty and which give the children access to a wide variety of high quality, engaging fiction and non-fiction texts. Once the children have progressed through the banded books, they move onto more challenging novels.
We encourage the children to read on a daily basis at home and hear them read regularly at school in guided reading lessons, discussing their reading and focusing on their comprehension. Children are given a variety of activities throughout the week to support them with this learning.
Children learn to read at different rates and we celebrate when children finish the reading scheme, encouraging them to become ‘free readers’ and choose their own books from their class library or from our school library.
We now have a new library system in place called “The Reading Cloud”. The Reading Cloud is a fantastic new online reading community designed to engage students, parents and educators in reading for pleasure.
Please click on the image below to access the website.
