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. Essential Letters and Sounds is a Systematic Synthetic Phonics (SSP) programme, validated by the Department for Education. 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.
ELS teaches children to read using a systematic synthetic phonics approach. It is designed to be used as part of an early learning environment that is rich in talk and story, where children experience the joy of books and language whilst rapidly acquiring the skills to become fluent independent readers and writers.
ELS teaches children to:
• decode by identifying each sound within a word and blending them together to read fluently
• encode by segmenting each sound to write words accurately
The principles of ELS are based upon:
• the delivery of whole-class, high-quality first teaching with well-structured daily lesson plans
• the use of consistent terminology by teachers, children and parents
• the use of consistent resources that support effective teaching
• repetition and reinforcement of learning
• regular and manageable assessment to ensure that all children ‘keep up’ rather than ‘catch up’
Our phonics provision equips the children with a secure skill set, which we believe enables them to become confident readers, writers and spellers.
You can find out more about ELS by following the link below:
https://essentiallettersandsounds.org/
Reading
Across Reception and KS1, the children will recieve a decodable text every week. The decodable text is closely aligned to the phonics sounds the children have learnt. Each child will also have access to the Essential Letters and Sounds eBook library, where you will find additional decodable texts that the children will have read in their phonics lessons during the week. The effective teaching of phonics supports children to recognise harder to read and spell 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.
