Phonics

‘Teach a child to read, and keep that child reading, and you will change everything.’ Ruth Miskin

Intent

At Godolphin Primary School, we provide our pupils with a high-quality education in English that will teach them to speak, read and write fluently so that they can communicate effectively. We are passionate about ensuring all children become confident and enthusiastic readers.

We value reading as a key life skill, one that lays the foundations for lifelong learning. We believe that phonics provides the basis for this learning and enables children to become fluent readers. Therefore, the teaching of phonics is of high priority at Godolphin Primary School. The Read, Write Inc. programme (RWI) is a systematic, synthetic phonics programme that explicitly teaches children to read accurately and fluently. At our school we want every child to learn to decode quickly and accurately so that reading becomes fluent and effortless.

Godolphin Primary School is committed to ensuring every pupil will learn to read, regardless of their needs, background and abilities. The lowest 20% of children are identified from our rigorous half termly assessments, and targeted for extra one-to-one tuition, in order for them to “keep up, not catch up”.

The RWI reading books that the children access in their daily phonics sessions at school, as well as those that they take home, are matched to the children’s phonic knowledge and so are fully decodable.

Implementation

At Godolphin Primary School pupils learn to read using an effective synthetic phonics programme. We use Ruth Miskin’s Read, Write, Inc scheme. The systematic teaching of phonics has a high priority throughout the Early Years Foundation Stage (EYFS) and Key Stage 1. Phonics is taught daily to all children in EYFS, Year 1 and those in Year 2 and 3 who have not passed the phonics screening or completed the RWI phonics programme. Pupils work within ability groups, which are defined by their performance on RWI assessments. Pupils are assessed every half term and the groups are reorganised accordingly. In EYFS, as well as daily lessons, essential knowledge and skills in phonics is developed through Fred Games and Pinny Time. All children are encouraged to transfer the skills they learn in their phonics sessions into their independent reading and writing.

We also practice these phonics skills throughout continuous provision in the learning environment and through teacher led activities. This means that children are using and developing taught skills throughout the year on a daily/weekly basis.

Meet Fred

Fred the Frog plays an important role in our Read Write Inc lessons. Fred is only able to speak in sounds, not whole words. We call this Fred Talk.

For example, Fred would say ‘m-a –t’ we would say ‘mat’. Fred talk helps children read unfamiliar words by pronouncing each sound in the word one at a time. Children can start blending sounds into words as soon as they know a small group of letters well. During lessons children are taught to hear sounds and blend them together in sequence to make a word. We start with blending oral sounds, then progress to reading the letters and blending them together to read the word.

The following video is an example of blending sounds with Fred.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dEzfpod5w_Q

 

Spelling with your Fred Fingers

Children are taught to use their fingers to help them write words. The children say the word out loud and break it down into its individual sounds. If a word has 3 sounds children hold up 3 fingers, 4 sounds 4 fingers etc. Children then pinch each finger as they say the sounds needed in the word then they write the letters that represent each sound.

For more details and and to view the order of teaching sounds please click on the Pdf below:

Useful links:

https://home.oxfordowl.co.uk/reading/reading-schemes-oxford-levels/read-write-inc-phonics-guide/

https://www.ruthmiskin.com/parentsandcarers/