Phonics

Our Intent

At St Botolph’s, we want every child to be successful, fluent readers by the end of Key Stage One and we believe that this is achievable through strong, quality teaching of knowledge and reading skills. Our teaching will provide the children with a firm grasp of skills, regardless of their starting point, and the confidence in themselves and their attitudes to learning. This is our vision as we know that if children have a lack of skills in this area, this can impact on other areas of learning and future career opportunities. The teaching of Phonics is the key strategy that is used to help our children to read, write and spell.

Policy and Key Documents

Our Phonics Programme

Read Write Inc

We have chosen and adopted the principles of Ruth Miskin’s, ‘Read, Write Inc’ (RWI) programme as our teaching approach. This is a vigorous, enjoyable, lively programme of phonic work that we have securely embedded within our curriculum and which meets the National Curriculum requirements (2014). In Read, Write Inc. Phonics lessons, children learn to read accurately and fluently with good comprehension. They learn to spell correctly and compose ideas for sentences.

Throughout the programme, children learn the English alphabetic code: the 150+ graphemes that represent 44 speech sounds. They rapidly learn sounds and the letter, or groups of letters, they need to represent them, in three sets of Speed Sound lessons. Simple and enjoyable mnemonics help all children to grasp the letter-sound correspondence quickly, especially those who are at risk of making slower progress or those who are new to learning English. This knowledge is taught and consolidated every day. High frequency words that are not phonetically regular are taught as ‘red words’ and are practised frequently.

Enjoyable phonic books are closely matched to children’s increasing knowledge of phonics and ‘red’ words so that early on, they experience plenty of success. Repeated readings of the texts support their increasingly fluent decoding.

Within our school, the Read Write Inc. programme is introduced in the Foundation Stage and is taught progressively through the terms that follow. We teach the programme daily for 30 minutes.

Phonics in Practice

Our Lessons

A typical ‘Read Write Inc.’ lesson includes the following elements, all with an aim to develop confidence in knowledge and skills:

Speed Sound lesson

To teach phonic sounds, we use the ‘Speed Sounds’ approach of the Read Write Inc. programme to teach all Set One, Two and Three sounds with the intention that they are read effortlessly and purely:

• Set One Sounds: These are sounds that promote the skill of blending. These sounds are taught from Term One in the Foundation Stage.
• Set Two Sounds: There are twelve set 2 ‘Speed Sounds’ that are made up of two or three letters which represent one sound. These sounds could be taught from Term Four of the Foundation Stage.
• Set Three Sounds: When learning their Set 3 speed sounds they will be taught that there are more ways in which the same sounds are written. These sounds will be taught in Year One.
• Set Four Sounds: These sounds are less common and have not been adapted by the Read Inc Programme. They are further alternative graphemes. We have chosen to include these sounds, from Term Five in Year One, to extend phonic knowledge.

Reading Activities

To apply their phonics knowledge, we use reading activities, taken from the Read Write Inc. programme of work, that include the use of the lively phonic books. These books are closely matched to the children’s increasing knowledge of phonics and ‘red’ words and, as children re-read the stories, their fluency increases. These activities include:

• Story green words
• Speedy green words
• Red word cards
• Partner practice
• Story introduction
• First read- children
• Read aloud- teacher
• Second read- children
• Third read- children

Home reading

Our children will make the best possible progress if they read as often as possible. The children will take home a RWI ‘book bag book’ at least every three days. ‘Book Bag Books’ are stories or non-fiction texts that has been carefully matched to each of the RWI storybooks read at school. The Book Bag book give children additional reading practice at home. In addition to this, we also offer ‘shared book’. These ‘shared’ books are labelled as such and will be matched as closely as possible to the children’s phonics level.

Further Information for Parents

The Sets of Sounds