Curriculum
Phonics
Curriculum intent, implementation, and impact
Curriculum content
At Wrekin View Primary School, we passionately believe in giving every child the opportunity to become a successful reader. We strive to ensure that all children can read confidently, fluently, accurately and with good understanding from the earliest possible age, regardless of their background, need or ability. We prioritise mastering the early reading skills as we recognise that these are the vital foundations for developing strong word recognition, reading fluency and deepened understanding. We are committed to giving our children the strategies needed to access a whole world of books, and therefore a lifetime of enjoyment as we nurture them into becoming avid lifelong readers.
We ensure that we are providing all children with a high-quality phonics education so that they are equipped with the strong foundations which can be built upon as they grow into confident, successful readers and writers. This process begins as soon as the children enter our Nursery setting, where they are baselined as part of our everyday practice. This baseline is used to decide upon a starting point for each child’s learning journey with us. Typically, new starters begin by following the ‘Listen with Lucy’ programme that is delivered by a trained member of staff. This encourages children to develop the basic skills of learning to listen for short periods of time, waiting your turn, sharing resources and beginning to maintain attention
Once children have completed this programme, and show they are ready to progress, they move onto our bespoke phonics program. We teach seven aspects: environmental, instrumental, body percussion, rhythm and rhyme, alliteration, voice sounds, and oral blending and segmenting are taught once per week, and then revisited in line with the Rosenshine Principles that we follow as a whole school. Within each phonics session, children sing the ‘silly soup’ song whereby they listen for and apply their understanding of initial sounds. This is one of the earliest building blocks in their Early Reading learning journey. We use games, stories and phonics songs from Super Sounds to supplement the teaching of our phonics sessions. This is an essential resource that we use for developing prereading skills, such as phonological and phonemic awareness.
For some of our children with limited language experiences, we use additional programmes to develop the skills they need. This is a flexible approach, and we adapt our curriculum in response to individual needs. Listen with Lola is a programme used to build on, reinforce and consolidate the prior learning that has been developed through following the Listen with Lucy programme. Nursery Narrative is a programme that we use with children who need further support to develop their language and vocabulary, and Attention Bucket is used to develop basic attention if needed. When assessed as ready, we begin to introduce Read, Write Inc Set 1 sounds in preparation for Reception.
We teach daily phonics lessons to all Reception, Year 1 and some Year 2 children through using Ruth Miskin’s synthetic systematic phonics programme, Read, Write, Inc. We systematically teach the children to hear sounds in words (phonemes) and then represent them using letters (graphemes). Phonics teaching continues into Key Stage 2 for those children who are identified as needing continued support through our formative and summative assessments. Fidelity to this scheme ensures that the teaching of Early Reading is consistent, progressive and effective. We ensure, through high quality training, our staff are equipped with the relevant knowledge and skills to provide consistent, effective phonics teaching that ensures all children make good progress.
During their first half term of Reception, children learn to read the first 30 Set 1 sounds. Small groups are formed for any children who enter Reception with prior phonics knowledge to ensure that we are maximising progress and sufficiently challenging all children. At the end of the first half term, we assess the children and group them based on ability so that they receive targeted support in small groups. We identify any children at risk of falling behind and provide one to one tutoring interventions to help them catch up straight away. This is in line with our phonics policy, ‘keep up’, not ‘catch up’. Once the children can recall the Set 1 sounds, they read texts that have words made up of the sounds they know. When revisiting previously taught ‘green’ words, we teach children to ‘Fred in their head’ so that they are ‘Super Speedy Readers’. This means that they can embed and apply their phonic knowledge and start to build their reading fluency. When secure, the children learn Set 2 and Set 3 sounds, and then read texts with increasingly more complex sounds and graphemes. Our children are exposed to phonics in the environment at every opportunity. Staff effectively reinforce strong, accurate decoding skills in all modelled reading and writing across the curriculum, and we actively encourage children to independently apply their phonetic knowledge throughout the school day; it is our aim for children to know more and remember more.
We have a robust and well-structured system in place to ensure all children have access to Read, Write, Inc. Book Bag Books which are matched to their phonic knowledge meaning all words can be fully decoded. This enables our children to experience regular success in their reading. We recognise the importance of reading and re-reading as an imperative factor to achieving fluency for our children.
We truly believe that a successful partnership between home and school is integral to securing and maintaining confident, fluent readers. We aim to provide parents/ carers with a wealth of knowledge, guidance, and useful resources to further develop their confidence with supporting their child at home. We run various workshops across the year for parents/ carers to attend in which they have access to presentations that guide them on how best to support their child at home.
