The Key Stage 1 Phonic programme is Sounds-Write First Rate Phonics. Sounds-Write is a highly structured, cumulative, sequential, explicit and code-oriented instructional programme for teaching all children to read and spell.

Sounds-Write places emphasis on giving practice that is grounded in physical, concrete experience of the ideas and conceptual understanding the pupils need to assimilate. It teaches the three essential skills of segmenting, blending and phoneme manipulation necessary for reading and spelling until all pupils achieve the ingrained habits that underlie the fluency of every successful reader.

Sounds-Write builds skills that are essential for children to decode (read) and encode (spell) words accurately with ease, so concentrate on comprehending and composing text. Phonics is taught on a daily basis as they move through the six phases of the programme.

The DfE have reported Sounds-write to have, ‘outstandingly thorough training.’

We place reading and early reading at the heart of our English Curriculum and we have a systematic programme in the teaching of reading this includes:

• Encouraging reading for pleasure- through a variety of texts available in school, daily opportunities for children to read and be read to by an adult and celebrating a love of reading.
• Word reading skills- both phonic decoding skills and the quick recognition of common exception words.
• Comprehension- including retrieving information, summarising, making inferences and using evidence from the text to justify these.
• Developing word reading and comprehension through high quality teaching is the priority at our school.
• Children are taught to apply these skills to read for meaning across a wide range of genres.

The Oxford Reading Tree forms the basis of our reading scheme initially and as the children progress this is supplemented with a range of reading books from other schemes.

A variety of teaching styles and methods are used and pupils are taught in class groups, small groups and individually. This allows us to ensure that each child receives their full educational entitlement and has a firm knowledge and understanding within these subject areas. Opportunities are given for the pupils to listen, talk, explore, describe and record their work.