Early Reading & Phonics

‘The gift of reading is like giving children a ticket to all that school and life have to offer’

INTENT

We are a reading school! At Buckingham Primary School we are passionate about growing our children into fluent, confident readers.

No other skill is more important than reading. It is the gateway to all other knowledge. If children do not learn to read efficiently, the path is blocked to every subject they encounter in their school years.

We are committed to teaching our pupils to become skilled readers who develop a comprehensive understanding of words, language and texts as they move through school.

Our children learn to read and then read to learn. Our aim is to ensure that pupils develop a love of reading so that they can read for purpose and for pleasure. Moreover, reading for pleasure, often and with enthusiasm, lays the foundations for life; you interact, react, empathise and understand the tools to express yourself and interpret life.

IMPLEMENTATION

 We provide children with a range of reading opportunities and strategies in order to do this including:

• A systematic approach to the teaching of phonics in EYFS and KS1
• A carefully designed reading scheme to ensure books are closely matched to phonics ability
• Enabling children to become fluent readers with automaticity, accuracy and prosody
• Engaging and encouraging children in reading for pleasure
• Wider reading opportunities linked to all areas of the curriculum

 At Buckingham Primary School, we carefully nurture each aspect of the child’s reading journey.  The skills of reading are carefully woven into our teaching and learning as we understand that reading is a multifaceted skill that gradually acquired over years of instruction and practise.

Phonics

At Buckingham Primary School, we believe that all our children can become fluent readers and writers. To support this, we have chosen to use Time for Phonics as our systematic synthetic phonics scheme. See this link for more information https://timeforphonics.co.uk/

 The term ‘synthetic’ is used to refer to the way that we combine the sounds to make a whole word. For example, by blending the individual phonemes, s-a-t makes the word ‘sat’.
When teaching synthetic phonics, the words are split up into the smallest possible sounds (phonemes). Phonemes are represented by letters (graphemes). These can be a single letter, e.g. ‘s’, two letters (a digraph) as in ‘ch’, or even three letters (a trigraph) like ‘igh’. 
English is a tricky language because it contains 26 letters but 44 different phonemes (individual sounds). Synthetic phonics teaches all the phonemes and the different ways they can be represented using graphemes. This enables children to read and write (though of course there are words that cannot be read by blending their individual phonemes – these are known as tricky words or common exception words).

Children in EYFS and KS1 will be sent home with 2 books each week:  

• A  Reading for Fluency book which is fully decodable for your child to practise their learnt reading skills at home. This is the book that we would like you to support your child to read. It will contain written sounds and tricky words that your child has learnt in school and matches their phonics ability. 
• A  Reading for Pleasure shared reading book, which is a high-quality picture book intended to develop your child’s passion for reading. This book will not be matched to your child’s reading level, and therefore they are not to attempt to read the words. This book is intended for your child to share with an adult or an older sibling, to enjoy the story and pictures without having to worry about applying their skills. Whilst you are sharing this book with your child, we recommend discussing the story and having enjoyable conversations such as what happened so far, what might happen next and what they liked or disliked about the story. 

IMPACT

 At Buckingham Primary School, we value reading as a crucial life skill. Through the teaching of systematic synthetic phonics, our aim is for children to become fluent and confident word readers by the end of KS1. As a Year 6 reader, transitioning into secondary school, we aspire that children are fluent, confident and able readers, who can access a range of texts for pleasure and enjoyment, as well as use their reading skills to unlock learning and all areas of the curriculum. By the time children leave us, they read confidently for meaning and regularly enjoy reading for pleasure. Our readers are equipped with the tools to tackle unfamiliar vocabulary and we encourage our children to see themselves as readers for both pleasure and purpose. We firmly believe that reading is the key to all learning and so the impact of our reading curriculum goes beyond the results of the statutory assessments.

We hope you and your child have many hours of enjoyable reading at home!