At Spalding St Paul's School we use the Phonics scheme Read Write Inc.
Phonics is for children in Reception, Y1 and Y2 who are learning to read.
Phonics is also for children in Y3 and Y4 who haven’t met the KS1 reading expectations.
Fresh Start is also used to support children in Upper Key Stage 2.
Each half-term, we assess and group our children based on their stage of reading not age of reading. This means all children practise reading at the right level.
Using RWI, we make learning to read easy for children because we start by teaching them just one way of reading and writing every sound. There are 44 sounds in the English language, but we use 150 ways of representing them making it one of the most complex languages to learn.
The sounds are grouped into sets, 1, 2 and 3. We teach Set 1 sounds first, single letters and one way of representing vowel sounds – a, e, i, o and u. It is important that children know letter sounds – not letter names – to read words.
What Read Write Inc. does is simple - we teach sounds, children practise reading and spelling words containing these sounds, then we give children decodable books containing sounds and words they can read.
They read each Storybook three times at school and again with you at home.
On each reading, as children’s fluency increases, the more they can focus on what the story is about.
Children also learn to spell the words they have been reading and develop their ideas into sentences so that they can write about the Storybooks they read.
Alongside this we read stories to children: stories they cannot yet read for themselves.
Our aim is for children to finish the RWI Phonics programme quickly so they can start reading these books for themselves.
