At Greasbrough Primary School reading is at the heart of our curriculum. It is our intention that every child will be a reader. From the start of their journey with us children are supported to develop a love of reading. They are exposed to high quality texts and through a consistent approach to the teaching of phonics, they are provided with the skills they need to decode confidently.

To teach reading we follow Little Wandle Letters and Sounds Revised, which is a systematic and synthetic phonics programme. Reading books are closely matched to the graphemes taught. These ‘decodable’ books are also sent home for children to practise until fluent.

Little Wandle Letters and Sounds Revised is a complete systematic synthetic phonics programme (SSP) developed for schools by schools. Based on the original Letters and Sounds, but extensively revised to provide a complete teaching programme meeting all the expectations of the National Curriculum, the Ofsted Deep Dive into reading and preparing your children to go beyond the expectations of the Phonics Screening Check.

Synthetic phonics has been proven to be the most effective approach to developing early reading proficiency and at Greasbrough Primary we believe this is the best way to introduce children to the joy of reading.

 

Throughout school we strive to encourage a rounded approach to reading where phonics skills are applied to increase fluency and improve comprehension. Our reading books are levelled to match the progression in phonics order to offer children a range of fiction and non-fiction texts, to challenge them at an appropriate level and to ensure accelerated learning.

Parents are partners in their child’s educational journey and are invited to phonics workshops. These sessions are used to support parents in gaining knowledge and understanding of how phonics is taught so that they have the skills to support phonics and early reading and writing at home. Further information about Little Wandle Letters and Sounds revised can be on the Little Wandle website.

Foundation 1 (Acorns)

Daily phonics sessions are introduced in FS1, covering the seven aspects of Phase One in Letters and Sounds. There is a focus on listening games, distinguishing between sounds and oral blending/segmenting. These skills develop children’s abilities to listen to, make, explore and talk about sounds. Children are also introduced to phase 2 graphemes to get children off to an early start in reading.

The structure of a phonics lesson

Each daily phonics lesson follows a 4 part lesson after the introduction as detailed below.

At Greasbrough Primary we adopt a mastery approach to teaching phonics. Children are taught in whole class groups and supported to access the age appropriate teaching content. The pace of the programme is maintained, with four new GPCs (Grapheme Phoneme Correspondences) and a selection of ‘Tricky words’ introduced each week. Any children who are not yet fluent readers will receive additional phonics teaching and ‘Keep up’ support regularly.

Children are taught the banks of ‘Tricky’ or common exception words aligned with Little Wandle Letters and Sounds Revised. Their developing phonics knowledge enables them to sequentially build up their store of words to become fluent and confident readers.

Children are taught to use phonics as the approach to decoding an unfamiliar word.

Children are taught how to apply their phonic knowledge independently and are provided with opportunities to practise and consolidate their skills in both reading and writing. Children are taught to sound talk and blend words using sound buttons to support their reading.

Every classroom has a high quality reading area with a selection of books including old favourite stories and new and bold award winning texts.

Pupils in EYFS and Year 1 have a guided reading session three times a week which lasts for 20-25 minutes and aims to build fluency, prosody and early comprehension skills. Some pupils also have further time built into the week to read 1-1 to an adult.