Early Reading & Phonics

At Billesdon C of E Primary School, we ensure pupils become skilled and fluent readers through high quality and engaging teaching sessions, while encouraging a love of reading for pleasure.

Early Reading and Phonics

Intent

At Billesdon Primary School, we are committed about ensuring all children become confident, independent and enthusiastic readers and writers. We place the highest importance on providing all children with a structured approach to learning to read from their very first days with us to ensure that every child succeeds and achieves well.

We believe that phonics provides the foundations of learning to make the development into fluent reading and writing easier. We want pupils to develop a love of reading, a good knowledge of a range of authors and be able to understand more about the world in which they live, through the knowledge they gain from texts.

Through daily, systematic and consistent high quality phonics teaching, children learn to segment words to support their spelling ability and blend sounds to read words. To allow our children to develop a strong phonic awareness and effective blending and decoding skills, we have chosen to use a synthetic phonics programme called Read, Write, Inc. produced by Ruth Miskin.  Read Write Inc. is a method of learning centred on letter sounds and phonics, blending sounds together to read and spell words and applying these skills across the curriculum.  Using Read Write Inc. the children learn to read fluently so that they can put all their energy into comprehending what they read.  We passionately believe that teaching children to read and write independently is one of the core purposes of a primary school enabling them to access a broad and exciting curriculum and ensuring they flourish as learners throughout their time at our school. Fluent reading skills not only hold the keys to accessing the rest of the curriculum but also have a huge impact on children’s self-esteem and future life chances.

Implementation

At Billesdon C of E Primary School , we follow a validated systematic synthetic phonics programme; Read Write Inc. (RWI).  RWI is a method of learning which is based around letter sounds and phonics, blending them together to read and write words and using these learnt sounds in their reading and writing:

Impact

Through the consistent, systematic and daily teaching of the Read Write Inc Phonics programme, our aim is for children to become fluent, confident readers by the end of Key Stage One.  Children are assessed at the end of Year 1 using a Government Statutory Assessment Tool known as the Phonics Screening Check. This screening check confirms whether the child has learnt phonic decoding to an appropriate standard and will identify sounds needing further support in Year 2.  The children are assessed one to one by the KS1 Reading Leader, who is a familiar adult to them.  Those who do not pass the screening will continue their phonics lessons in Year 2 by being streamed into the correct group within the Year 1 cohort.  This allows for them to consolidate and develop their confidence, within a group aimed at their specific ability, ready to retake the screening at the end of Year 2.

Through the Read Write Inc. programme, children will be equipped with the skills to decode unfamiliar words using strategies that they have been taught in their daily lessons.  This way, children can focus on developing their fluency and comprehension as they move through the school. This will enable our children to access a world of reading and writing; essential skills as they journey into Key Stage 2, as well as develop a love of reading, taking pleasure in exploring the rich literary world around them with a firm phonic basis to support them.