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Reading and Phonics

Reading at Whiston Willis Primary School

Reading opens the doors to a world of knowledge and allows us to explore everything around us. It is more than a fundamental skill – it is a necessity!

Here at Whiston Willis, we teach reading through a variety of ways, these include phonics, guided reading sessions, reciprocal reading, shared reading and independent reading. Not only do we teach our pupils the skills needed to read, we want to ignite a love of literature within them. Books are well loved throughout our school and our staff are true advocates of reading. Our children understand that we can gain a lot from a love of books and they can bring a great deal of enjoyment to us. They are also aware that books give us an insight into many topics and they provide us with new perspectives. Our passion for reading can be felt in all areas of our school and we hope to encourage others to love books as much as we do.

Guided Reading Cycle

We teach guided reading through a three phase cycle. During this cycle, the children will immerse themselves in a fiction and non-fiction text, as well as another media such as photographs, illustrations, lyrics or poetry. This ensures that the children are constantly being exposed to a range of genres and text types. Over this period, the children will focus on particular skills such as prediction, factual retrieval, inference, vocabulary, explanation, summarising and sequencing. Discussion is promoted within class and we encourage the children to have inquisitive minds and raise questions.

Reciprocal Reading

Reciprocal Reading is used from Year 3 to Year 6. Year 2 are gradually prepared for Reciprocal Reading during the spring term. During Reciprocal Reading sessions, children have the opportunity to develop and deepen particular reading skills, these are: prediction, questioning, clarifying and summarising. We also encourage the children to challenge each other’s views courteously to promote in-depth discussions.

Reading at Home

All children at Whiston Willis are encouraged to continue their reading at home.

All children will have a reading record and in KS2, a reading homework journal. Children are expected to complete 3 entries a week in their reading homework journal and this should be checked by a parent/carer. These activities allow the children to practise and further develop the skills they have been taught in school.

Accelerated Reader

All children can access our Accelerated Reader scheme using books from our school or local library. This is a fantastic scheme that promotes a love of reading and helps develop the children’s comprehension skills. Parents are able to access their child’s Accelerated Reader account too which means they can carefully track their progress over time. As a school, we use this scheme to help assess each child’s ability to read. By doing so, we are able to direct them towards the most appropriate books for their age and ability.

Oxford Reading Tree

In addition to the vast array of books in our library, we also use the Oxford Reading Tree Scheme. These books are used in KS1 and lower KS2 to help develop fluency and comprehension. It is a well-established scheme that is rooted in reading for pleasure and it offers a wide selection of stories and genres. Each child will have a book band which is suited to their current ability.

The below are guidelines bands are guidelines and children will progress through the scheme at the necessary speed based on the professional judgement of teaching staff.

Age 4 – 5
Year: Reception
Band: Pink | Level: 1
Band: Red | Level: 1+, 2
Band: Yellow | Level: 3

Age 5 – 6
Year: 1
Band: Blue | Level: 4
Band: Green | Level: 5
Band: Orange| Level: 6

Age 6 – 7
Year: 2
Band: Turquoise | Level: 7
Band: Purple | Level: 8
Band: Gold | Level: 9
Band: White | Level: 10
Band: Lime | Level: 11

In school, we follow the Letters and Sounds programme. Letters and Sounds is a phonics resource published by the Department for Education and Skills which consists of six phases. We begin teaching phonics in our nursery, where the children will be introduced to and work their way through Phase 1. The children will then work on Phases 2 and 3 in reception class, Phases 4 and 5 in year one and Phase 6 in year two. 

Phonics at Whiston Willis:

The Terminology

Phoneme

A phoneme is the smallest unit of sound in a word. It is generally accepted that most varieties of spoken English use about 44 phonemes. These are the sounds that you can hear the letters make in words.

Graphemes

A grapheme is a symbol of a phoneme. It is a letter or group of letters representing a sound when written down.

Segmenting and blending

Segmenting consists of breaking words down into phonemes to spell. Blending consists of building words from phonemes to read. Both skills are vitally important in the development of early reading and writing.

Digraph

This is when two letters come together to make a phoneme. For example, /oa/ makes the sound in ‘boat’ and is also known as a vowel digraph. There are also consonant digraphs, for example, /sh/ and /ch/.

Trigraph

This is when three letters come together to make one phoneme, for example /igh/.

Split digraph

A digraph in which the two letters are not adjacent and have been split up by another letter – e.g. make, the k has split the digraph ‘ae’.

Abbreviations

VC, CVC, and CCVC are the respective abbreviations for vowel-consonant, consonant-vowel-consonant, consonant-consonant-vowel-consonant, and are used to describe the order of graphemes in words (e.g. am (VC), Sam (CVC), slam (CCVC).

Phase 1

Phase One of ‘Letters and Sounds’ concentrates on developing children's speaking and listening skills and lays the foundations for the phonic work which starts in Phase 2. The emphasis during Phase 1 is to get children attuned to the sounds around them and ready to begin developing oral blending and segmenting skills. Phase 1 is divided into seven aspects.

Each aspect contains three strands:

· Tuning in to sounds (auditory discrimination)

· Listening and remembering sounds (auditory memory and sequencing)

· Talking about sounds (developing vocabulary and language comprehension)

Phase 2

In Phase 2, letters and their sounds are introduced one at a time. A set of letters is taught each week, in the following sequence:

Set 1: s, a, t, p

Set 2: i, n, m, d

Set 3: g, o, c, k

Set 4: ck, e, u, r

Set 5: h, b, f, ff, l, ll, ss

The children will begin to learn to blend and segment to help begin reading and spelling. This will begin with simple words.

Words using set 1:

Words using set 1 and 2:

Words using set 1-3:

Words using set 1-4:

Words using set 1-5:

Alongside this, children are introduced to tricky words. These are the words that are irregular. This means that phonics cannot be applied to the reading and spelling of these words. We teach the children that they have to be learnt by recognition.

The tricky words introduced in phase 2 are:

Phase 3

By the time children reach Phase 3, they will already be able to blend and segment words containing the 19 letters taught in Phase 2. Over the twelve weeks which Phase 3 is expected to last, twenty-five new graphemes are introduced (one at a time).

Set 6: j, v, w, x

Set 7: y, z, zz, qu

Consonant digraphs: ch, sh, th, ng

Vowel digraphs: ai, ee, igh, oa, oo, ar, or, ur, ow, oi, ear, air, ure,

er

Tricky words:

Phase 4

By Phase 4, children will be able to represent each of the 42 phonemes with a grapheme. They will blend phonemes to read and segment CCVC words for spelling. They will also be able to read two syllable words that are simple. They will be able to read all the tricky words learnt so far and will be able to spell some of them. This phase consolidates all the children have learnt in the previous phases and they start to work with adjacent consonants in words, such as fl, br, str, etc.

Tricky words:

Phase 5

Children will be taught new graphemes and alternative pronunciations for these graphemes, as well as graphemes they already know. They will begin to learn to choose the appropriate grapheme when spelling.

New graphemes for reading:

Tricky words:

Phase 6

In phase 6, the focus is on learning spelling rules for word endings (these are known as suffixes). The children will learn how words change when you add certain letters. There are 12 different suffixes taught:

-s -es -ing -ed

-er -est -y -en

-ful -ly -ment -ness

Phonics at home

Tips for teaching your child the sounds:

¨ It is important for a child to learn lower case or small letters rather than capital letters at first. Most early books and games use lower case letters and your child will learn these first at school. Obviously you should use a capital letter when required, such as at the beginning of the child's name, e.g. Paul.

¨ When you talk about letters to your child, remember to use the letter sounds rather than the alphabet names of the letters. The reason for this is that sounding out words is practically impossible if you use the alphabet names. eg. cut, would sound like: see you tee!

¨ When saying the sounds of b, d, g, j and w you will notice the 'uh' sound which follows each, for example buh, duh... You cannot say the sound without it, however, try to emphasise the main letter sound. Try hard not to add this ‘uh’ sound on to the end of letters such as s, c, h and p.

Useful webpages

http://www.letters-and-sounds.com

http://www.phonicsplay.co.uk

https://www.oxfordowl.co.uk/for-home/reading-owl/phonics-made-easy/

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