Phonics
The teaching of phonics is our primary strategy for teaching reading. Our primary aim is to develop phonological skills to enable children to become fluent readers and confident writers.
In order to achieve this:
- Phonics is taught on a daily basis for approximately 30 minutes on the carpet followed by booklet activities.
- The Little Wandle scheme is followed where we use the interactive presentations to support us with the teaching of Little Wandle, these are sorted by term and week.
- Children throughout the EYFS and Key Stage One are taught in year groups.
- Regular formal and formative assessments and observations are carried out and teachers to use these assessments to see where further interventions might be needed throughout the day
- Teachers and TAs follow the scheme in order to ensure consistency in practice and fidelity.
Children will be taught:
- grapheme–phoneme correspondences in a clearly defined, incremental sequence
- to apply the highly important skill of blending (synthesising) phonemes in the order in which they occur, all through a word to read it
- to apply the skills of segmenting words into their constituent phonemes to spell
- that blending and segmenting are reversible processes.
At the end of Year 1 there is a statutory assessment, the Year 1 Phonics Screening Check which takes place in June of each year.