Reading & Phonics
Reading Schemes
At Moorside Primary Academy we aim to foster a love of reading amongst our children from the day they join us. We have a planned reading spine across school for each year group which is a range of texts and poetry shared across the year. Our English curriculum is taught through novels using the Pathways to Write Scheme. We have a collection of Page Turners linked to each year group to foster reading for pleasure. Children are encouraged to recommend these to others using our ‘Reading Scrapbooks’ based in each year group. We also send reading books home.
At Moorside Primary Academy, all our early reading books are colour banded. Your child will be given a colour band to choose their home reading book from which will help to ensure that the book they select is at about the right reading level for them. Every colour band in EYFS and KS1 includes books from our Reading scheme Little Wandle Revised Letters and Sounds so that they will experience a range of stories, text types and illustrations.
All books within EYFS and KS1 are fully decodable using phonics skills and knowledge linked to our scheme. Children will have experienced these books several times in school before they come home so they should be confident and fluent with them.
In Key Stage 2 we continue to use books matched to a child’s reading ability from our Bug Club reading scheme. We ask parents to support children at Key Stage 2 with their comprehension and demonstrating what they have understood about the book they have read. Our Key Stage children also access Reading Plus to support with the development of fluency and comprehension.
Reading for Pleasure
We have termly reading breakfasts and all parents are invited in to read with their children on a termly basis. We encourage you to borrow books from our school collection to enjoy with your children through our Page Turners. We encourage families to share books with their child. Children are encouraged to change their books regularly. Children will bring reading books and high frequency words home weekly and we ask you to spend some time with your child looking at these and comment in their reading record. Every child in school has a reading record book that comes home. Children will bring home books from our Page Turners which are a range of texts selected for each year group which children access across the year. In EYFS and Key Stage 1 these are books to be shared and enjoyed with your child they are not aimed at children reading them independently. Read them, enjoy them and talk about them. At Key Stage 2 the focus is on children developing their independent love of reading across a range of authors so children can access these independently.
From Reception, pupils have a home reader (Linked to Little Wandle revised Letters and Sounds) and continue to take home books for sharing with their parents alongside this. All children are asked to continue learning unknown High Frequency Words and read at least three times weekly including accessing Reading Plus at Key Stage 2 using their individual log ins.
In order to support wider reading we have invested significantly in quality engaging texts for our children and these are freely available in class reading areas and the whole school library area which children can access at break and lunch times.
Phonics
At Moorside Primary School, early reading is taught using synthetic phonics as the main approach to reading. Pupils are systematically taught the phonemes (sounds), how to blend the sounds all through the word for reading, and how to segment the sounds in order to write words. They are taught to use their phonic skills and knowledge as their first approach to reading, but are also taught high frequency words which do not completely follow the phonic rules.
At Moorside Primary School we firmly believe that good phonics teaching is at the heart of successful early reading and writing experiences. This has been an area of significant investment for us recently. We have purchased Little Wandle Revised Letters and Sounds, a new reading scheme and an online resources linked to this scheme to support teaching and learning and sustain the children’s progress.
Timescales given in Little Wandle Revised Letters and Sounds act as a guide to staff across school and where children are not keeping up same day interventions are used to support individual children.
Support for parents can be found using this link.
Little Wandle Revised Letters and Sounds – A Summary
Little Wandle Letters and Sounds Revised has been developed by Little Sutton and Wandle English Hubs and taken forward by Little Sutton Primary School and Wandle Learning Trust in partnership with other phonics and early reading experts. Our schools have developed a highly effective Letters and Sounds approach over recent years, with Phonics Screening Check results consistently amongst the top five per cent in the country.
Little Wandle Letters and Sounds Revised has been built around the update (Department for Education – Letters and Sounds improving rates of progress 2021) that we were funded to produce by the Department for Education, as well as drawing on the latest research into how children learn best, how to ensure learning stays in children’s long term memory and how best to enable children to apply their learning to become highly competent readers.
Children access structured daily phonics lessons and where they need them same day interventions to ensure all children keep up with the programme.
| Phase | Phonic Knowledge and Skills |
| Phase One (Nursery/Reception) | Activities are divided into seven aspects, including environmental sounds, instrumental sounds, body sounds, rhythm and rhyme, alliteration, voice sounds and finally oral blending and segmenting. |
| Phase Two (Reception) up to 6 weeks | Learning 19 letters of the alphabet and one sound for each. Blending sounds together to make words. Segmenting words into their separate sounds. Beginning to read simple captions. |
| Phase Three (Reception) up to 12 weeks | The remaining 7 letters of the alphabet, one sound for each. Graphemes such as ch, oo, th representing the remaining phonemes not covered by single letters. Reading captions, sentences and questions. On completion of this phase, children will have learnt the “simple code”, i.e. one grapheme for each phoneme in the English language. |
| Phase Four (Reception) 4 to 6 weeks | No new grapheme-phoneme correspondences are taught in this phase. Children learn to blend and segment longer words with adjacent consonants, e.g. swim, clap, jump. |
| Phase Five (Throughout Year 1) | Now we move on to the “complex code”. Children learn more graphemes for the phonemes which they already know, plus different ways of pronouncing the graphemes they already know. |
| Phase Six (Throughout Year 2 and beyond) | Working on spelling, including prefixes and suffixes, doubling and dropping letters etc. |
Support for Reading
When children are identified as not making the progress we would expect then we act swiftly to address this in the following ways:
- Keep up and Catch up phonics sessions
- Little Wandle Revised Letters and Sounds SEND programme for children where appropriate
- Use of Nessie as a Key Stage 2 intervention
- 1:1 Readers
- Precision teaching of HFW
- External support from professionals when needed
