Reading and Phonics

Reading is an essential part of a child’s education and is the key which opens the door to learning and to wider reading and a world of stories, poetry and information.

Here at Great Wood Community Primary, the children will initially bring home reading books linked to our phonics scheme. They will be asked to read their book three times to develop their decoding skills, fluency and comprehension. Once the children are ready to move away from the phonetically decodable books, we follow the Big Cats and Oxford Reading Tree reading scheme. Regular practice will help the children to become confident readers and therefore we ask that the children read at least three times a week at home.

We want all of our children to be readers who choose to read for pleasure and we expose the children to a range of text through storytime, texts used in English and guided reading lessons and the use of text across the curriculum. All classrooms have reading areas and the school has a library. Throughout the year, there are lots of opportunities to celebrate reading through events like World Book Day and author visits.

Phonics is a method for teaching reading and writing by developing a learner's ability to connect speech sounds (phonemes) with letters or groups of letters (graphemes). It enables children to "decode" words by breaking them down into sounds and blending them together to read, and segmenting them to spell.

Within our school, we teach the Little Wandle Systemic Synthetic Phonics Scheme in EYFS and Key Stage 1. The children are taught phonic lessons daily from their entry into school and their learning is embedded across the curriculum. Children who are not secure in their phonic knowledge in Key Stage 2 continue with their phonic learning through small group work or additional phonics lessons.

Little Wandle phonics programme draws on the latest research into how children learn best; how to ensure learning stays in children’s long term memory and how best to enable children to apply their learning to become fluent, confident readers.