Shrewton CE Primary School
Our Phonics scheme is Sounds-Write.
Sounds-Write is a synthetic phonics programme based on the Science of Reading. The scheme starts with the sounds of a child's native language and teaches them how to represent those sounds in writing. It uses a multisensory approach and a mediated learning process where teachers model the learning.
What lessons look like:
The structure and simplicity of Sounds~Write makes it a programme accessible to all learners and helps them to make good progress with their reading and spelling.
We explicitly teach the children the 3 skills of:
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blending (putting sounds together to read a word)
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segmenting (breaking a word into sounds to spell)
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phoneme manipulation (sound swapping).
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Children in Reception to Year 2 take part in 30 minute lessons daily, where they learn how to read and build words of increasing complexity. Our older children continue to have books which match their phonic knowledge to promote fluency in addition to Talk for Reading sessions to develop vocabulary and comprehension skills. The level of challenge in each year group is carefully considered and reflects the teaching of our English lessons across the school and the objectives set out in the National Curriculum. Sounds~Write reading books form the core of our reading scheme in Early Years and Year One. These are supplemented by a range of other phonetically decodable books from Dandelions and Sounds~Write. Children then progress onto our reading scheme where they have access to a variety of texts, which continues to be made up of books from reading schemes as well as books by popular authors. More informationIf you would like to find out more about Sounds~Write and how you can support your child at home there is a fantastic online course for parents run by the Sounds~Write founder, John Walker. This can be found at https://www.udemy.com/help-your-child-to-read-and- write/learn/v4/overview |
How do I provide a rich reading experience for my child?
Parents and carers often ask us what books they should read to their children.
We recommend you read a wide variety of books to your children, from classic picture books to non-fiction texts on topics that interest them.
Reading a wide variety of books to your child will provide rich reading experiences that promote a love of reading. These can be books from the class book boxes, the school library or home. The majority of these books contain complicated alphabet code knowledge, much of which has not yet been explicitly taught in Reception/Kindy or at the start of Year 1.
We encourage you to read these books with your child, rather than getting them to read them.
In doing so, you will;
- model what fluent reading ‘sounds’ like
- model appropriate expression and phrasing (e.g. slight pauses at commas and full pauses at full stops)
We also suggest that you:
- talk about the book and encourage your child to retell the main parts of the story to you
- talk about the characters, plots and settings of stories and link these to the illustrations provided
- discuss what was learnt from informational texts e.g. “What did you find out about spiders?”
- compare the people and events in the texts with those in your own lives
- select several words from the text (that your child would know) and ask them to put the word in a sentence - this is a powerful vocabulary building activity