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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.

Parkwood Academy – Reading after Read, Write Inc. 

Our book list has been thoughtfully designed by the staff in our school with the intention of ensuring that all children at Parkwood Academy are exposed to the very best fiction that has been written.

Books have  a power to create a living library inside a child’s mind. It is a store of classics and essential reads that help children engage at a deeper level and enter the world of the story, enabling them to experience the intrinsic sense of pleasure that reading can bring as well as developing their knowledge of the world. When we select books we are looking at whether these books are ‘windows or mirrors’.

Mirrors are books that contain storylines, characters, and experiences you can see yourself in. You can make personal connections to these books. You feel seen and heard after reading a book that is a mirror.

A book that is a window helps you see into the life or experience of someone else. You may not be able to relate, but you can learn and grow from that storyline or the book’s characters. We like to have a good balance of windows and mirrors.

The titles have been carefully selected for their quality as stories or poems and in terms of how they can support the children’s understanding of the subjects covered in the school’s curriculum. They also reflect the diverse society in which we live in today, and explore themes around protected characteristics.

Our aim is that children will use it as a launch pad for their own journeys as life-long readers.