Phonics and Reading
Statement of Intent:
It is our intent that reading inspires, engages, and challenges pupils and we aim to develop key skills to enable all children to become fluent and confident readers. We will support and encourage all children to decode, comprehend and enjoy reading regardless of starting points and strive to enable substantial progress through high quality teaching and learning. Reading is a skill essential for life and at Cusgarne Primary School we want our children to leave school with a passion for reading. We aim to promote a love of reading across all ages so that children access high quality texts across the curriculum, encounter rich & varied vocabulary and develop their comprehension skills. We want reading to develop as a transferrable skill which will enable pupils to become inquisitive, improve their spoken and written literacy skills and become lifelong learners.
In Phonics we aim to:
o Teach every child to read.
o Ensure phonics and reading teaching is accessible to every child.
o Build each child’s alphabetic code, to enable them to master phonics to read and spell as they move through the school.
o Model the application of the alphabetic code through phonics in shared reading and writing, both inside and outside the phonics lesson and across the curriculum.
o Instil confidence in every child with their encoding and decoding skills.
o Encourage every child to see themselves as a reader for both pleasure and purpose.
At Cusgarne Primary School we teach phonics using Little Wandle Letter and Sounds Revised which is a complete systematic synthetic phonics programme (SSP) developed for schools by schools. It is based on the original Letters and Sounds but has been extensively revised to provide a complete teaching programme meeting all the expectations of the National Curriculum, the Ofsted Deep Dive into reading and preparing your child to go beyond the expectations of the Phonics Screening Check (PSC).
At Cusgarne, we consistently achieve outstanding PSC results which are above the national average.
As children progress from Year 2 onwards, they access the school reading programme where they are exposed to a broader range of texts. When reading, adults will ask children a range of questions linked to VIPERS (see information attached) which incorporates the six domains of comprehension skills as a method to assess children’s ability to understand and make sense of what they are reading.
By developing a shared interest between teachers, parents, and children we are hoping to create a passion for reading in our children, whether it is through comics, Kindles, books or even newspapers and we can achieve this by working together.
Check out the top 100 books you should read before leaving Cusgarne Primary School. How many of these books have you read already?
