At Peases West Primary School, we believe that being able to read and write are the essential skills that enable us to understand and express ourselves more effectively.
These skills open the door to learning. We passionately believe in helping children to develop not only the technical skills of reading and writing, but also in engendering a love for literature and the different genres of writing.
Phonics
Our teaching and support staff have been trained in the phonics programme ‘Sounds-Write’ and our teaching of reading and writing in school is based on the Sounds-Write programme. This begins when children join Reception year and continues until they are a confident and competent reader and speller. Sounds-Write is a DfE approved scheme.
The knowledge of sounds and symbols is an important starting point for understanding and using written language and we believe that a strong and consistent approach to the teaching of phonics is vital for our children to begin to access the rest of the curriculum. This is, however, used in conjunction with many other strategies to help children to begin to read and write.
Children have a reading diary which needs to be signed and dated each day and brought back to school daily. Once a full page of the diary is completed, children will receive a reward in school.
Once children have completed the Sounds-Write phonic scheme and are confident recognising all sounds, they will progress to levelled books. These books consolidate previous phonics learning and introduce more challenging words.