Phonics and Reading Scheme
Early Reading and Phonics Intent
At Little Leigh Primary School, we are passionate about ensuring all pupils develop the skills to become confident, enthusiastic and passionate readers and writers. We believe that the teaching of reading is integral to a child’s understanding of the world around them. Every child will experience a rich reading environment, which is underpinned by quality first teaching of phonics; providing the foundations to support the development of reading and writing across the curriculum. Our Phonics approach is carefully sequenced to allow children to build the skills to segment, blend and decode words in order to become fluent readers.
These skills enable the pupils at Little Leigh to develop a passion towards reading, understand and read a variety of texts, acquire new knowledge and become lifelong readers.
Early Reading and Phonics Implementation
At Little Leigh Primary School, we endeavour to foster a love of reading from an early age. We ensure that reading is at the heart of the curriculum from Reception through to Year 6, allowing every child to access a variety of reading experiences including whole class shared reading, individual reading and class story times. Beginning in Reception, the children are immersed in a variety of texts across the curriculum, which supports their understanding of culture, vocabulary and knowledge of the world.
Phonics is taught daily in EYFS and KS1 through carefully planned and sequenced lessons. Previously learnt phonics knowledge is revisited throughout KS2. Our phonics lessons teach children to read by identifying the phonemes (smallest unit of sound) and graphemes (written version of the sound) within words and use these to read words. Children experience the joy of books and language whilst rapidly acquiring the skills they need to become fluent independent readers and writers. At Little Leigh Primary school, we follow the Essential Letters and Sounds programme. Each lesson begins with a review of the children’s prior knowledge in phonics, which is followed by the teaching of new sounds and an opportunity for the children to practise and then apply their learning. Our phonics lessons are fast paced, clearly modelled, interactive and challenging to ensure effective learning and progress is made.
Please click the link below to find out more information about Essential Letters and Sounds.
The children’s phonics learning is linked to the books they read. Each child’s reading level is closely aligned to the phonics phase they are focusing on. The effective teaching of phonics supports children to recognise common exception words and segment and blend different sounds when reading unfamiliar words, enabling them to become fluent readers. The children’s fluency helps them gain a comprehensive understanding of a variety of texts within their shared reading and individual reading sessions.
Our phonics provision equips the children with a secure skill set, which we believe enables them to become confident readers, writers and spellers.
Reading Scheme
Across Reception and KS1, we use Collins Big Cat phonic texts to support reading and phonic development.
For individual reading and reading at home, we use the Collins Big Cat scheme from stages 1 to 9. This is complemented by a quality text by an author suitable for their stage of reading development..
In KS2 we have a wide selection of texts used for whole class reading sessions. Teachers also use a wide range of resources, such as excerpts from websites or newspaper excerpts from publishers such as ‘First News’.
