Call 01245 354605
Phonics and Reading
Read, Write, Inc – Phonics at Parkwood
At Parkwood Academy, we use the Read, Write Inc. approach to teaching Phonics, to deliver fast pace, engaging lessons where every child is an active participant. We aspire for all of our children to develop positive attitudes towards phonics as staff share their enthusiasm and passion for the subject by bringing the teaching and learning to life. Teachers ensure that every phonics lessons has purpose and that this is shared with the children so that they know the one thing they should be thinking about. Praise is also used throughout to encourage and motivate all pupils to try their best and to create a positive learning environment.
Children in Reception, Year 1 and Year 2 participate in a 20 minute phonics session every day. During each lesson, the children learn a new sound and its written representation. Alongside the teaching of each sound, the children are taught a fun phrase to help them with either forming the written representation correctly (e.g. o – all around the orange) or with remembering the sound (e.g. ay- May I play?). Every lesson, the children also practise blending sounds together to read words and segmenting spoken words into their individual sounds for spelling.
When learning to read words, by blending sounds together, we teach the children to use ‘Fred talk’. ‘Fred talk’ is a process whereby the children help Fred the frog to read whole words as he can only recognise and say individual sounds (e.g. Fred could say ‘d-o-g’ and we could blend the sounds together to read the word ‘dog’). As the children become more confident with blending sounds together orally, they are then encouraged to internalise this process. The children practise using ‘Fred talk’ to read decodable words which contain the sounds that they have been taught along with nonsense words to prepare them for the Phonics Screening Check at the end of Year 1.
As part of our phonics lessons, we also teach the children to apply their phonic knowledge to spell spoken words. To do this, we teach the children to use ‘Fred fingers’. This is the process whereby the children convert spoken words into their individual sounds and then into their written representations. The children count how many sounds are in a spoken word and hold up the relevant amount of fingers. They then pinch each finger as they say each sound out loud needed to form a word and then after they write the letters down to represent each sound.
Once the children have successfully learnt all 44 sounds of the English language and have shown competence in being able to speedily blend and segment them, they will then move on to developing their comprehension skills to become fluent readers. They will explore a range of fiction and non-fiction texts and develop their skills to be able to summarise, infer and retrieve information quickly. They will also develop an understanding of a wider range of vocabulary, as they explore the meanings of unfamiliar language, and will progress their knowledge of grammar and spelling through a range of activities.