Early Reading and Phonics

Early Reading

At Queen’s Crescent School, children practise their reading in class Group Reading lessons using the fully decodable “Bug Club Phonics” books. The children also take home books from our selection of Collins “Big Cats” fully decodable books and are allocated six Collins “Big Cats” ebooks per term. These books are closely matched to the children’s developing phonological knowledge and our phonics program. When children read in groups, they are matched accordingly.

During the school Group Reading lessons, a carefully selected book is read with each group three times to allow for the key components of reading fluency and comprehension to be developed:

First read: accuracy and automaticity (quick recall of known words)

Second read: prosody (reading with expression)

Third read: comprehension (understanding vocabulary/word choice and retrieving information)

Once the children become fluent readers, they have access to a wider range of books to allow for more lengthy discussion and to help develop their understanding and widen their vocabulary.

Phonics

At Queen’s Crescent, we work closely with the Ramsbury English Hub to develop and maintain a Systematic Synthetic Phonics Program (SSP). We are currently a Letters and Sounds school and we use synthetic phonics as a way to teach reading and spelling.

The children are taught to read letters or groups of letters by saying the sounds they represent as pure sounds. They then start to read by blending the sounds together to make a word (synthesising). We use a systematic approach where each grapheme is introduced in turn and applied to reading and spelling. This enables the children to begin reading and writing words, captions and whole sentences as soon as possible.

Pure sounds link:

https://www.oxfordowl.co.uk/for-home/reading/phonics-made-easy