Early Reading/Phonics Lead Mrs L. Skelding
English Lead Mrs E. Fisher
HOW DO WE TEACH PHONICS, READING AND SPELLING AT ST. BOTOLPH'S?
At St. Botolph's, we use Read Write Inc. (RWI), an inclusive synthetic phonic programme to teach our children to read, to write and to spell. We have adopted this as our whole school approach as the programme facilitates a graduated and tailored approach to learning basic sounds and letter formation before advancing to more complex sounds and reading for comprehension. The programme moves with integrity from learning to read to reading to learn.
We use Read Write Inc. Phonics (RWI) to give your child the best possible start with their literacy. Mrs Skelding is our Early Reading Lead and Mrs Fisher is our English Lead, so if you have questions about RWI, please contact them. Please take the time to read the information as it will provide invaluable information as to how you can help and support your child in reading.
RWI sessions occur each day as the continuity and pace of the programme is key to accelerating the progress of children’s reading development. This method of phonics teaching is both systematic and repetitive in order to embed learning; the programme also offers plenty of opportunities for fun based, interactive learning using drama, role play and props to engage with and to enjoy texts and stories. The children work in small groups according to their confidence and understanding. These groups are reconfigured on a regular basis in order to match the pace and the progress of each child; this reconfiguration also allows Class Teachers to identify where 1:1 interventions may be required in order to meet the expectations of both the Phonics Check and the end of Key Stage 1.
Aims and Objectives
The overarching objectives of the RWI programme are to teach pupils to:
- apply the skill of blending phonemes in order to read words,
- segment words into their constituent phonemes in order to spell words,
- learn that blending and segmenting words are reversible processes,
- read high frequency words that do not conform to regular phonic patterns,
- read texts and words that are within their phonic capabilities as early as possible,
- decode texts effortlessly so that their focus can be used on reading to learn (comprehension),
- spell effortlessly so that their focus can be directed towards the composition of their writing
It is essential that when sounding out words, each phoneme is pronounced correctly. Please have a look at the following video which supports correct pronunciation of phoneme and grapheme correspondence.
Children who read regularly or are read to regularly have the opportunity to open the doors to so many different worlds! More importantly, reading will give your child the tools to become independent life-long learners.
We can achieve this together through encouraging children to develop a love of books by reading to them daily, at home and at school and giving children access to a wide range of books at school and at home.
RWI Spelling is an interactive programme which teaches spellings in a fun and engaging way. Each unit is introduced with a short video. It helps children to learn spellings with common patterns and uses rules in order to help them recall spellings as well as teaching exceptions to these rules.
Individual workbooks allow children to practise their spellings and the teaching naturally follows on from the Spell Review part of the RWI phonics programme. Therefore the children are already proficient at using dots (for individual sounds) and dashes (for digraphs) and prefixes and suffixes can be added to root words to help them to spell with greater accuracy, understanding and confidence. Log books give children ownership of their spellings and further consolidation through other areas of the curriculum.
The RWI Spelling programme includes lots of partner and group practice in addition to competitive group challenges that help children commit new words to memory.
These activities include dictation, ‘four-in-a-row’ (working with a partner to spell four given words correctly in a row) and ‘dots and dashes’ (identifying the graphemes in words). The children love Team Teach, where they get to test their spelling in small groups. Red and Orange words involve revising high-frequency words that are often misspelt and Special Focus sessions, which tackle topics such as homophones and contractions, that often lead to confusion.
Handy Tips for supporting your child with spelling
Make sure that the log book is used to practise the tricky spellings regularly. To download a copy of the Set 2 and 3 sounds and rhymes click below:
Ask your child to explain the rule for the week and get them to give you example words so that you can build up a word bank that can be referred to frequently.
When your child is writing their spellings, remind them to use their dots and dashes and ‘Fred fingers’ to spell.
Encourage your child to edit their own writing for misspelt words using the sounds chart to choose the right grapheme. To download a copy of the sound chart click the button below.
Play homophone games where you give them a word like right/write and they write you both spellings and show you on the sounds chart which graphemes they would choose to spell them right! Make sure they know which one is which!
Play hold a sentence dictation where you give the child a short sentence with one of their spellings in which will help them to understand the meaning of the word and spell and punctuate correctly.
Accelerating reading progress
In Upper Key Stage 2 we use RWI Fresh Start as an additional reading support.
Fresh Start teaches older children to read accurately and fluently with good comprehension. It is rooted in phonics and uses age-appropriate decodable texts.
They learn the English alphabetic code: the 150+ graphemes that represent 44 speech sounds. The children experience success from the very beginning. Lively stories and non-fiction texts are both age appropriate and closely matched to their increasing knowledge of phonics and ‘tricky’ words and as students re-read the texts, their fluency increases.