Twiss Green Primary School Reading and phonics Twiss Green Primary School

Why is reading important? It is vitally important to get children off to an early and successful start in reading. Those who read well are likely to read more, thus setting an upward spiral into motion. In school we provide all children with as many reading experiences as possible. The act of reading builds all abilities including verbal ability.

How do we teach reading at Twiss Green Primary School? We teach reading by teaching the skills needed to dismantle a written word into its separate sounds and reassemble it orally. This is called phonics.

Synthetic Phonics Children are taught to identify and blend all the sounds in words before the stage of reading the words in books for themselves. This ground work takes about a term for most children and brings fluency to their reading and writing much earlier. Children learn much faster when they know the letter sounds and can work words out for themselves.

Letters and sounds Phonics programme The Letters and Sounds phonic programme aims to build children's speaking and listening skills in their own right, as well as to prepare children for learning to read by developing their phonic knowledge and skills. It sets out a detailed and systematic programme for teaching phonic skills for children starting by the age of five, with the aim of them becoming fluent readers by age seven.

There are six overlapping phases. Phonic Knowledge and Skills Phase One (Nursery/Reception) Activities are divided into seven aspects, including environmental sounds, instrumental sounds, body sounds, rhythm and rhyme, alliteration, voice sounds and finally oral blending and segmenting. Phase Two (Reception) Learning 19 letters of the alphabet and one sound for each. Blending sounds together to make words. Segmenting words into their separate sounds. Beginning to read simple captions. Phase Three (Reception) The remaining 7 letters of the alphabet, one sound for each. Graphemes such as ch, oo, th representing the remaining phonemes not covered by single letters. Reading captions, sentences and questions. On completion of this phase, children will have learnt the "simple code", i.e. one grapheme for each phoneme in the English language. Phase Four (Reception) No new grapheme-phoneme correspondences are taught in this phase. Children learn to blend and segment longer words with adjacent consonants, e.g. swim, clap, jump. Phase Five (Throughout Year 1) Now we move on to the "complex code". Children learn more graphemes for the phonemes which they already know, plus different ways of pronouncing the graphemes they already know. Phase Six (Throughout Year 2 and beyond) Working on spelling, including prefixes and suffixes, doubling and dropping letters etc.

Some definitions Phoneme Grapheme The smallest individual unit of sound that can be extracted from a word. Grapheme The written letter or letters representing a phoneme. Digraph – a combination of two letters making one sound, e.g. ‘sh’, ‘ch’ Trigraph – a group of three letters representing one sound, e.g. ‘igh’, ‘ear’, ‘air’

High frequency words The majority of high frequency words are phonically regular. Some exceptions – for example the and was which we identify and teach as ‘tricky words’

Blending Blending involves recognising the letter sounds in a written word, for example c-u-p, and merging or synthesising them in the order in which they are written to pronounce the word e.g. ‘cup’. Other examples of blending: b-a-t – ‘bat’ m-a-p – ‘map’ t-e-n – ‘ten’

Oral Blending Hearing a series of spoken sounds and merging them together to make a spoken word. No text is used. For example, when a teacher calls out ‘b-u-s’, and the children say ‘bus’. Oral blending is the key to children blending independently. This can be done at home, in the car, on the way to school etc in the form of an ‘eye-spy’ game.

Reading Books High frequency word cards Reading books matched to your child’s reading level

Segmenting Identifying the individual sounds in a spoken word (e.g. h-i-m) and writing down letters for each sound to form the word ‘him’. Word Phonemes shelf Sh e l f dress d r ss think th i n k string s t ng sprint p flick ck

Jolly Phonics Jolly Phonics is a fun and child centered approach to teaching literacy through synthetic phonics. With actions for each of the 42 letter sounds, the multi- sensory method is very motivating for children. Now it’s your turn to learn the actions that accompany each of the 42 letter sounds!

Book Bands We use books from a wide range of published schemes in order to give the children a broad range of books. These include schemes such as ‘Jelly and Bean’, ‘Oxford Reading Tree’, ‘Big Cat Books’, ‘Floppy’s Phonics’ and ‘Read, Write Inc.’ Initially these match the phonics the children have been taught, but as reading progresses, sight vocabulary and other words that are exceptions to the phonic rules are introduced. The Book Bands’ are a nationally recognised system of levelling the challenge in reading books. These bands now go right through school to ensure progression.

Classroom Organisation to support the teaching of reading The children read at every available opportunity. This includes: Whole class reading from a ‘Big Book’ or the Interactive Whiteboard Listening to reading by an adult Guided Group Reading in a group of similar readers reading with an adult and discussing the book Independent reading to research for learning or follow written instructions Screen-based reading from software or safe websites such as the ‘Newsround’ pages