At English Martyrs’, we use the Sounds-Write phonics programme to teach our children to read, write and spell.
Sounds-Write is effective in teaching pupils to read, spell and write because it starts with what all children know from a very young age – speech sounds. From there, it takes them in carefully sequenced, incremental steps and teaches them how each of the 44 or so sounds in the English language can be spelt.
All pupils in Reception begin the initial code in the September of their Reception year and then continue this journey throughout Year 1 and into Year 2. All adults involved with teaching phonics have attended a 4-day training programme on the delivery of Sounds Write.
We explicitly teach the 3 skills of:
- Blending
- Segmenting
- Phoneme manipulation (sound swapping)
The children are taught to decode and encode by understanding 4 clear concepts:
- Letters are symbols that represent sounds that they say
- Sounds can be spelt using 1,2,3 and 4 letters – f, oa, air, eight
- The same sound can be spelt in different ways – bone, coat, toe, window, shoulder
- The same spelling can represent different sounds – bread, eat, great
Within this conceptual framework, we teach the factual knowledge required to become an effective reader and speller: the approximately 176 spellings that represent the 44 or so sounds in English, starting with the most simple one-to-one correspondences.
Reading and spelling also requires expertise in the skills necessary to make use of the alphabet code and pupils need to be able to:
– segment, or separate sounds in words
– blend, or push sounds together to form words
– manipulate sounds: take sounds out and put sounds into words
Sounds-Write provides opportunities for practising these skills daily until pupils achieve the automaticity required for fluent reading and spelling.
If you would like to learn more about our approach to phonics please clink on the links below:
Parent Links (free course)
Part 1: https://www.udemy.com/course/help-your-child-to-read-and-write/
Part 2: https://www.udemy.com/course/help-your-child-to-read-and-write-part-2/
Library
Children have regular opportunities to choose library books and change their reading books. Our library is well stocked with a fantastic range of books for all ages and interests.
How can you support your child’s reading at home?
Children in all year groups are expected to read daily at home and log their reading in their reading diaries. We would also encourage the children to read anything that they are interested in, as well as their reading books.
Read to your child as much as possible. Reading aloud to your child helps to develop their range of vocabulary and enhance their enjoyment of books which in turn helps them develop their writing skills. It can be helpful to talk about the characters in the books, perhaps stop and ask your child what he/she thinks may happen next, how a character may be feeling and why or ask their opinion on the story.
