Phonics

At Patrick’s we are passionate about ensuring all children become confident and enthusiastic speakers, readers and writers. We believe that phonics provides the foundations of learning to ease the development into fluent reading and writing. Through phonics, children learn to segment words in order to spell and to blend sounds together to read words and sentences.

At St Patrick’s we use ‘Unlocking Letters and Sounds’ as our systematic synthetic phonics programme. This programme ensures our phonics teaching and learning is progressive from Nursery up to Year 2. Children in Nursery work on Phase 1 phonics, which concentrates on developing their speaking and listening skills and lays the foundations for the grapheme to phoneme correspondence. When ready children move onto Phase 2.

As children move into Reception they continue to build on their listening skills and are introduced to further sounds. They have discrete, daily phonics sessions where they revise previous learning, are taught new graphemes/phonemes, practise reading together and apply what they have learnt. Through Unlocking Letters and Sounds, the children are taught the 44 phonemes that make up all the sounds required for reading and spelling. Children work through the different phases and as they grow in confidence and experience. All phonics lessons have a writing element, where children apply their knowledge of sounds to write in sentences.

Children are continually assessed throughout their learning of phonics and this assessment is used to group children and identify need. Any child not making expected progress will have additional phonics teaching following structured intervention from the scheme to ensure they keep up from the start. Daily interventions run for children from Nursery to Year 6 where needed.

Reading

We believe that reading encourages emotional, intellectual, spiritual and social development; as well as enabling pupils to acquire knowledge and to build on what they already know. An excellent education in English will expose children to a wide variety of texts, which they are taught to understand in depth. Books will inspire, motivate and reflect our children’s current situations, as well as open doors for their future. At St Patrick’s, we understand and value reading as one of the most powerful skills in enabling children to participate fully as members of society. We also believe in the abundance of pleasure it can offer. Therefore, all staff aim to foster a love of reading in every child.

For Pleasure

At St Patrick’s, we aim to foster a love of reading in all of our children. We:

• Understand our children as readers, by completing regular reading audits and surveys.
• Share our passion and enthusiasm for reading with the children, reading to children daily.
• Timetable Reading for Pleasure Time every day for 15 minutes.
• Provide a wide variety of texts for children to enjoy and recommend books for their interests.
• Ensure there is an engaging and organised space in every classroom for them to use.
• Provide opportunities to listen to and engage with authors.

Guided Reading

All children on the phonics programme complete a guided reading session three times per week. They read books matched to the sounds they have learned. The guided reading sessions focus on decoding, building fluency and teach basic comprehension skills.

Whole-Class Reading

Once children are competent and have completed the phonics programme, they begin to focus more on the skills of reading comprehension. From Year 2 to Year 6, children have four 30 minute whole-class reading sessions per week where they focus on fluency; retrieval; sequencing and summarising and inference and comparison. The sessions are focused on guided practice: teachers model the skills and children practice together before applying their learning to an independent task. These sessions are aimed at deepening our children’s understanding of texts they read.

At Home

Children are expected to read daily at home. For children on the phonics programme, books are sent home that match the child’s learning so far. They also take a reading for pleasure book home. Children in Key Stage Two, take home a school reading book and a library book. Weekly comprehension homework is also sent home to help reinforce learning.