Summercourt Academy

Reading & Phonics

At Summercourt Academy our priority is both the teaching of reading skills and enjoyment of literature, enabling children to become lifelong, confident readers. As children build fluency, comprehension skills become our main area of focus and questioning looks at skills such as retelling, inference and prediction.

We believe through reading, pupils will have a chance to develop culturally, emotionally, intellectually, socially and spiritually. We feel that reading enables pupils both to acquire knowledge and to build on what they already know.

Our intent is to:

Ensure pupils read easily, fluently and with good understanding
Develop the habit of reading widely and often, for both pleasure and information
Acquire a wide vocabulary and understanding of the conventions of reading
Appreciate our rich and varied literary heritage

The working out of the pronunciation of unfamiliar words (decoding) and the speedy recognition of familiar printed words. The understanding that the letter on the page represent the sounds in spoken words. This begins with phonics teaching in early years.

The process of recap, revisit and recall is embedded into reading comprehension lessons, to ensure long-term retention of skills and information to aid pupils in later life and empower them for life beyond Summercourt Academy.

Summercourt Reading Policy.pdf

At Summercourt Academy we use a synthetic phonics programme to teach reading called 'Read Write Inc' produced by Ruth Miskin. As children progress and can decode fluently they move onto the Literacy and Language scheme which develops children’s comprehension, vocabulary, writing, critical thinking and discussion skills and grammar – in a fun and meaningful way.

Read Write Inc Phonics is a method of teaching reading which is centred around learning the sounds of the letters (phonics), and then blending them together to read words. The children also learn to break down words into individual sounds in order to write them.

How it works

The children are assessed and grouped according to their ability.

They work in small groups with a teacher and a teaching assistant.

At the end of each half term the children will be assessed again to check they have made progress and will be grouped again. In addition to the Read Write Inc programme the children will also be working on writing skills and storytelling in their classes with their own class teacher.

Reading

Using Read Write Inc the children learn to read effortlessly so that they can put all their energy into understanding what they read.

When using 'Read Write Inc' to read the children will:

Learn 44 sounds and the corresponding letter/letter groups using simple picture prompts

Learn to read words by blending the sounds together

Read lively stories featuring words they have learnt to sound out

Show that they understand the stories by answering 'Find It' and 'Prove it' discussion questions.

Writing

Read Write Inc allows the children to spell effortlessly so that they can put their energy into working out what they want to write.

When using 'Read Write Inc' to write the children will:

Learn to write the letters/letter groups which represent the 44 sounds (graphemes)

Learn to write words by sounding them out and then writing the corresponding graphemes

Learn to write simple and then increasingly complex sentences

Compose a range of texts using discussion prompts

Compose stories based on picture strips.

Talking

When using 'Read Write Inc' the children work in pairs to:

Answer questions to practise every activity

Take turns talking to each other

Give positive praise to each other.

Blending

Children learn to read words by blending the letter-sounds that are in the Speed Sound sets
(shown further down the page).

Help your child learn to read words by sound-blending e.g. c-a-t = cat

Help children to say the pure sounds, as quickly as they can, and then to blend the sounds together to say the whole word.

Set 1 sounds

Set 2 sounds

Set 3 sounds

How will I know how to pronounce the phonic sounds?

Visit the Read Write Inc Parent's Page

You can practise saying the sounds by downloading the phonic sounds PowerPoint presentation. Save the presentation to your computer and click 'view slideshow' to run the presentation. Click your left mouse button to cue each sound.

WHAT ELSE CAN I DO TO HELP MY CHILD TO READ?

Read a variety of books (fiction, non-fiction, rhymes etc).

Discuss the different features of various books.

Talk about the books and other reading materials that you have shared.

Explain the meaning of new words.

Most importantly though, show the fun that can be gained by listening to stories and reading a range of texts. e.g. reading and then following a recipe together

Don't forget you don't have to read just books, cereal packets, shopping lists, road signs, web pages, magazines, newspapers etc are useful ways to practise reading.

It is crucial that children in the EYFS are given provision that supports the development for a life long love for reading. Children are taught to word read using a synthetic phonics programme called Read Write Inc. The curriculum is planned carefully to ensure that children are exposed to high quality texts that excite and invite many learning opportunities. Topics and themes include rhymes, songs and poems and the children enjoy regular opportunities to retell starriest through drama and role play.

KS1 children (year 1 and 2) continue their reading journey with the Read Write Inc programme, where children focus on learning to decode words. They practise to recognise common phoneme-grapheme correspondence to read and also to spell phonetically. Once graduated from the programme, they consolidate and broaden their reading skills using our DERIC approach with a wide variety of texts. The tasks include Decode, Explain, Retrieve, Interpret and Choice question types, which helps to consolidate their decoding skills as well as develop their comprehension skills.

Pupils in Class 3 develop their reading skills by completing ERIC activities. ERIC stands for: examine, retrieve, infer and choose. These are all important elements of reading comprehension, and focusing on these skills helps us become more confident, astute readers. Our ERICs are linked to our curriculum learning for each term, for example learning about working conditions for Cornish miners in the 19^th Century.

In reading, Class 4 (year 5 and 6) have been displaying great comprehension skills. They answered a variety of questions to showcase different reading skills, including: explain, retrieve, interpret and choice questions.

Class 4 shared their ideas for each question and then composed a group answer based on their ideas. As a school we refer to this learning as an ERIC.