Phonics & Reading

We teach early reading using the Read Write Inc Phonics scheme.  Our Reading Leader is Ms Ferdusi Akhtar.  This video explains how RWI Phonics is structured systematically to ensure that each child makes excellent progress.

There are lots of really useful resources to use at home here.

Each week, children take home RWI Phonics books that precisely match their knowledge of phonics and relate to the sound that they are learning in school.  Children use the Bug Club scheme of banded books to ensure that they experience a range of different genres and to develop their skills of reading comprehension.  Our school library and vibrant book corners in every classroom provide opportunities for children to make their own choice of books, in line with their interests.  They also make use of the online Nessy Reading & Spelling system; this ensures that they can read and spell accurately and with automaticity.

Phonics Glossary

 blending

       Blending is the skill of joining sounds together to read words. Children are taught to say the separate sounds in a word and

       to then blend them together to decode the word.

 digraph

       A digraph is a sound that is represented by two letters e.g. the sound 'a' in rain is represented by the digraph 'ai'.

grapheme

       A grapheme is a visual representation of a sound e.g. a letter or a group of letters.

       Some sounds are represented by a single letter whilst others are represented by more than one letter.

 phoneme

A phoneme is a unit of sound e.g. the word 'cat' contains three phonemes; c - a - t.

 segmenting

Segmenting is the opposite of blending. Children are taught to segment a word into its separate sounds in order to spell it.

 split digraph

A split digraph is a digraph that is separated by other letters e.g. the sound 'a' in the word take is represented by the split

digraph a-e.