Children who read regularly or are read to regularly have the opportunity to open the door to so many different worlds. More importantly, reading gives children the tools to become independent, life-long learners as reading is the key to many areas of the curriculum.

At St Breock, we aim for all our children to become fluent, confident readers who are passionate about reading.

We achieve this through:

• A carefully planned programme to support your child's early reading journey.
• Experiencing an environment which is literacy rich, across all subjects.
• Encouraging children to develop a love of books by reading to them daily, at home and at school.

How do we teach early reading?

We follow a systematic synthetic phonics approach to teach early reading. We use a programme called Read Write Inc. Phonics which we teach daily to children in Reception and Key Stage 1.  Throughout the programme, children learn the English alphabetic code: the 150+ graphemes that represent 44 speech sounds. They rapidly learn sounds and the letter, or groups of letters they need to represent them, in three sets of Speed Sounds Lessons. Simple and enjoyable mnemonics help the children to grasp the letter-sound correspondences quickly, especially those who are at risk of making slower progress or those who are new to learning English. This knowledge is taught and consolidated every day. High frequency words that are not phonically regular are taught as ‘tricky’ words (we call them Red Words) and are practised frequently.

Lively phonic books are closely matched to the children’s increasing knowledge of phonics and ‘tricky’ words so that, early on, they experience plenty of success. Repeated readings of the texts support their increasingly fluent decoding.

Read Write Inc. Phonics

Our Phonics Progression document sets out the expectations of progress that the children will make as they advance through the phonics programme. Children are placed in homogenous groups according to their acquired skills and are assessed and regrouped regulary to enable rapid progress. Our Read Write Inc. Phonics Book Progression document outlines the different coloured reading book levels the children will read as they make progress. 

Support

We hold Year Group Reading Meetings for parents and carers at the start of every academic year as well as additional, smaller meetings throughout the school year to provide more tailored advice and support at each stage. The Ruth Miskin website (founder of Read Write Inc. Phonics) and Oxford Owl (the publisher for all of our Read Write Inc. Phonics resources) provide a wealth of information for parents on their websites. Please see below for the links.

Useful Websites

Ruth Miskin – guidance and support for parents

Oxford Owl – guides and resources for parents