Phonics
Learning to read is the most important thing your child will learn at our school. Everything else depends on it, so we put as much energy as we possibly can into making sure that every single child learns to read as quickly as possible. We want your child to love reading – and to want to read for themselves. This is why we put our efforts into making sure they develop a love of books as well as simply learning to read.
Read Write Inc. Phonics and Reading programme
At Alexandra Park Primary, we follow the Read Write Inc Phonics/Reading scheme.
Read, Write Inc is a highly successful phonics programme for children aged 4 to 7 who are learning to read and write. It teaches children how to both decode and understand written language to become confident and enthusiastic readers and writers. This is achieved by a dynamic approach to teaching phonics that is consistent across the school using the Read, Write Inc phonics resources and fully decodable reading books.
Children are grouped according to their ability in Early Years and Key Stage 1 to ensure that teaching is matched to their level. Phonics in Early Years and Key Stage 1 takes place on a daily basis. Children in Key Stage 2 that still require phonics teaching, continue with a specially tailored programme (RWInc) to meet their individual needs.
Shared Reading forms part of the daily phonics lessons and is led by the reading teachers. Each child reads for at least 20 minutes every day, in a small group with their reading teacher. All texts are linked to the child's phonic ability. Children enjoy one focus text per week and learning activities support accurate and fluent reading to facilitate comprehension. In addition, children take fully decodable reading books home to further practice skills learnt at school. These books are matched to each child's phonics ability and are closely monitored by the reading teachers to ensure that children are reading books of an appropriate level. Each child visits the school library every week to select a book of their choice to share at home. Visits to the school library are quality sessions where children explore and discover books by different authors and of different genres.
Good Reading Habits
Throughout the curriculum, teachers encourage children to develop these reading habits:
- To sound/out segment words that they find difficult to say.
- Reread phrases, sentences or paragraphs in order to help with understanding.
- Infer from the text: consider what a character is like/what they are feeling; develop your own picture of a setting, adding in your own features based on what you have read.
- Identify words that are tricky and to try and infer meaning from the text.
- Make predictions based on what has been read.
- Ask questions based on what you have read and your own interests.
- Make links with other texts based on themes/styles.
- Develop your own opinion on the text.
Children progress from the Read Write Inc. Phonics programme to the Essential Spelling programme. A dedicated spelling session is taught daily from Year 2.
Support with phonics at home has a huge impact on children’s ability to learn more and remember more. Listening to your child read every day is the perfect way to help them practise their phonics. Your child will bring home a fully decodable book matched to their current phonics level. The more they read this book, the more fluently they will be able to recognise the sound-spellings and blend the sounds together. As they continue this process, words are then mapped into their long-term memory to enable them to automatically read words and therefore read fluently. This is an essential part of children’s journey to become fluent readers who comprehend what they read. We ask that you listen to your child read at home as often as possible. This chart demonstrates the cumulative impact of daily reading on your child. 
Please communicate with your child’s teacher via the reading diary and/or seesaw to help us build a picture of your child’s reading.
Getting the balance right between developing positive attitudes towards reading and developing independent readers who persevere is a tricky balance to get right. Try not to help your child too quickly when they get stuck but provide prompts. Children should use their phonics knowledge to help them read words - they should not guess.
As well as reading, you can support your child’s phonics learning through playing games like: how many words can you think of that start with the ‘e’ sound (egg, elephant, excellent), finding rhyming words, spotting sound-spelling relationships in words when you are out and about (look the a in danger is showing us the A sound).
As mentioned above, listening to your child read as often as possible has a huge impact on on their reading development. However, to become a successful reader, there is more that needs to be developed other than the phonics needed to read the words. The comprehension house below shows all the different elements of reading that you need in order to understand what you read. Through sharing stories and talking about texts, you will be helping to develop your child’s language comprehension. Your child will come home with a ‘sharing book’ that they have chosen from our library. Please read this with your child, enjoy it and talk about the story. If you would like more sharing books, please contact your child’s teacher who will be able to help.
