English - Phonics and Reading

Intent

At Farncombe Infant School we strive to enrich and develop children’s vocabulary and stretch their imagination in both reading and our phonics teaching. We provide all children with opportunity to read for pleasure and to listen to good role-models reading. We want all children to become confident readers who are able apply their phonics and reading skills into their writing across a range of genres with good understanding of purpose and audience.

The National Curriculum for English aims to ensure that all pupils:

  • Read easily, fluently and with good understanding

  • Develop the habit of reading widely and often, for both pleasure and information

  • Acquire a wide vocabulary, an understanding of grammar and knowledge of linguistic conventions for reading, writing and spoken language

  • Appreciate our rich and varied literacy heritage

  • Use discussion in order to learn

  • Are competent in the arts of speaking and listening

 

Implementation

All children in Reception, Year 1 and Year 2 receive 5 phonic lessons per week. Children in Key Stage 1 have 4 English lessons a week which are focused on developing writing skills based on the Talk for Writing approach.

 

Phonics

At Farncombe we follow Little Wandle Letters and Sounds Revised. The progression across Reception and Year 1 can be found here.

In Reception, children are taught Phase 2 and Phase 3 sounds and skills needed to decode and blend increasingly challenging words as set in Phase 4. This ensures they are ready to access the Key Stage 1 curriculum.

In Year 1, children continue to revisit and review all previously learnt sounds and are introduced to Phase 5 sounds.

By Year 2, it is expected that children have progressed through phonics phases 1 to 5 and will have a secure knowledge of all sounds. They will be ready to progress to learning spelling rules and patterns. For those children not yet secure with their phonic knowledge additional support is put in place to keep up.

 

Reading

Reading is a high priority at Farncombe. It is interwoven across the curriculum with rich quality texts within writing and story times. Reading for pleasure is encouraged throughout the school with each year group having an allocated school library slot to enable children to choose books of interest. We have developed an age appropriate reading spine of books for each year which we feel the children should share with a grown up or read themselves to heighten their pleasure of reading.

As well as daily phonics lessons in EYFS and Key Stage 1, children have daily Guided Reading Sessions.

In Reception and Year 1, we teach children to read through reading practice sessions three times a week with a school adult. We use decodable books matched to the children’s secure phonic knowledge using the Little Wandle Letters and Sounds Revised assessments and book matching grids. Each reading practice session has clear focus, so that the demands of the session do not overload the children’s working memory. The reading practice sessions have been designed to focus on three key reading skills: decoding, prosody: teaching children to read with understanding and expression and comprehension: teaching children to understand the text.

By Year 2, we expect the children to be able to read and decode all words within phonics phases 1-5 and apply these skills to develop their fluency of reading.