Phonics
At Greyfriars Academy reading is recognised as a key life skill and of paramount importance to academic success. We strive to ensure all children become enthusiastic, motivated and life-long readers and writers with a love of literature and an enjoyment of reading for pleasure. We enable the development of children’s confidence in reading and writing by exposing them to a wide variety of genres, text types and reading and writing experiences. This supports them to develop the necessary skills to accurately decode words in order to be able to read fluently with a good comprehension.
In the Early Years Foundation Stage (EYFS) and Key Stage One (KS1), there is a greater emphasis on phonics; this is then applied throughout the rest of the school to consolidate what has been learnt. This is not to say Phonics teaching is restricted to this these key stages. We use the same support for children in their later stages of schooling or for children who speak English as an additional language.
Your child will begin the Read Write Inc Phonics programme when they start at Greyfriars Academy
What is Read Write Inc?
When teaching your child to read, we never use letter names at this early stage. Many schools use different phonics schemes to teach children to read, at Greyfriars Academy, we believe Read Write Inc Phonics is the best scheme to support your child in learning to read. Your child will be assessed and grouped according to their phonics ability, working in small groups with a teacher or teaching assistant. Read Write Inc uses pure sounds, it removes the ‘uh’ sounds from words.
Phonics Screening Check
In Year one, your child will have a Government Led, phonics screening check, this is normally held around June. The purpose of the check is to confirm whether individual children have learnt decoding and blending skills to meet an age-appropriate standard. The phonics screening contains 40 words and your child will work one-to-one with the teacher, reading words out aloud. There will be a combination of real words and nonsense words.
We believe that Phonics is crucial to provide the foundations of learning to make the development into fluent reading and writing easier in all subject areas. Through Phonics, our children learn to segment words to support their spelling ability and blend phonemes to read words.
Key Stage 2
In Key Stage 2 children are guided through appropriate incrementally book banded reading material. They are then encouraged to choose ‘free reading’ books from either the class, or school, library. Children are also allowed to borrow books to take home: either to read to someone at home or to be read to by someone at home. This encourages reading enjoyment and the sharing of books with adults and siblings.
In each year group we also have a set of age appropriate books that the teacher reads to the class on a regular basis. This teacher modelling of texts gives the children a model of how to read using expression, intonation and awareness of punctuation.
Where appropriate children receive extra support within, or outside the classroom from either the class teacher or teaching support to ensure all children achieve.
