Phonics
At St Chad’s we use the Read, Write Inc. to teach phonics. This is a synthetic phonics programme that is designed to teach the children to become fluent and confident readers. Children are taught the skills of decoding and comprehension.
Quickly after starting Reception, the children begin to learn one way to read the 40+ sounds. They blend these sounds into words using ‘Fred Talk’ and then learn to read the same sounds with different graphemes. They also learn to read some common non-decodable words.
This continues into Year 1, and if needed Year 2, where the children learn further ways to read words using the same sounds and different graphemes and apply these to read poly syllabic words.
Reading
As the children progress through school comprehension is taught through a whole-class skills approach. Children are taught discrete skills over a period of time which allows them to answer a variety of questions i.e. inference, summary and word meaning.
The children will bring home a home reading book that is closely matched to their reading ability. Once the children are confident and fluent readers they will progress to our Accelerated Reader scheme. This enables children to read a wide range of books at their individual reading level and take a short quiz to check their understanding of the book they have read.
We encourage our children to read at home on a regular basis and have this recorded in their reading records.
To foster a love of reading, children are read a wide range of texts on a regular basis. Each class has a reading area and all children have access to our library and can change their books weekly. We have some fantastic reading helpers who come into school weekly to listen to children read. We are also so lucky to have Arnie, our reading dog, who comes into school every Thursday afternoon with Mrs Tippey.
