Reading
At St Mary's Catholic Primary School we value reading as a key life skill and we are dedicated to enabling all our children to become lifelong readers who have a love of reading and literature. We view every part of the school day as an opportunity for reading, no matter how small. Reading is at the heart of the whole school curriculum, and embedded across all subject areas.
Our teachers are highly skilled at teaching reading both from the early stages through to the fluent competent reader.
Teachers model the joy and pleasure of reading on a daily basis. We recognise that mastery in phonics is fundamental to children being able to access a broad range of fiction and non-fiction texts, across the curriculum. We aim to achieve this by teaching phonics systematically to address the needs of all learners. Within our context, ensuring children have cultural/global capital and experiences to become engrossed and immersed in reading is vital.
Teachers instil a love and passion for reading. Our engaging book areas, high quality texts, world book days, mastery reading through Vipers and daily reading for pleasure sessions are just part of what our enriching reading curriculum offers.
We firmly believe that as teachers if we give children the right skills alongside the right books, we can instil a love of reading that will foster lifelong readers.
‘If you don’t like reading it’s just because you haven’t found the right book.’
Phonics
Reading starts with robust phonics teaching. Our teaching staff ans support staff are highly skilled in delivery of phonics lessons and interventions.
The program sets out detailed and systematic programme for teaching phonic skills for children starting in Early Years with the aim of them becoming fluent readers by age seven.
| Phase | Phonics skills and knowledge |
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Phase 2 Reception Autumn term |
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. |
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Phase 3 Reception Spring term |
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 4 Reception Summer Term |
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 5 Througout 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. |
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Phase 6 Throughout Year 2 |
Working on spelling, including prefixes and suffixes, doubling and dropping letters etc. |
