Reading & Phonics
At St Aidan's Catholic Primary school, your child's reading journey starts when they are in Nursery. In the Nursery the children will start by sharing stories, non -fiction books, nursery rhymes and songs; talking about what they have heard, sung and discussing pictures.
Early reading skills start with their communication and language and move onto their understanding of book and how they work- concepts about print. These early skills are vital foundations that will aid your child as then continue on their reading journey, all the way through school. These skills are developed through a variety of ways; Story times, guided reading, taught lessons, continuous provision activities, etc
Alongside these skills, the children will take part in a variety of informal play based phonics sessions and activities, which we refer to as phase 1 phonics. Phase 1 phonics is linked directly to phonological awareness and phonemic awareness. Phonological awareness allows children to recognise and work with the initial sounds of spoken language. Phonological awareness is the awareness of all of the speech sounds of language.
These are the essential stepping stones which enable to children to move onto more formal phonics teaching in Reception, Year 1 and Year 2.
Please see files for detailed information about each phase 1 aspect.
Formal Phonics
At Saint Aidan's we use a scheme call Read Write inc, to teach phonics. Read Write inc. teaches children the sounds in English, the letters that represent them, and how to form the letters when writing. Read Write Inc. Phonics includes reading books written using only the letters they have learnt at each level (and a small number of separately taught tricky words). The children will quickly feel confident and successful. Alongside this the children will have guided reading session and home reading books.
For more videos on how to support your child's reading please Click here.
Phonemes are split into different groups Stretchy, bouncy, and vowel sounds. There are multiple ways to write the different sounds. See the chart below.
Children are taught phonemes in sets; set 1, set 2 and set 3. These sound make up the decodable words once the children have learnt each set of sounds. These words are called green words.
When reading the children will also come across non-decodable words. We call these words red words. These are words that children just have to learn to read.
Read Write Inc Free eBook Library
Oxford Reading Tree free eBook Library
