At Lostwithiel Primary School we love reading and value the many benefits that it provides. We believe it is key for academic success and it plays a big part across our Curriculum on a daily basis. We promote a reading culture that inspires children to love reading, makes them want to read and helps them to develop into ardent, avid readers and life-long learners.
“The more that you read, the more things you will know. The more that you learn, the more places you’ll go!” The more that you learn, the more places you’ll go!”– Dr. Seuss
At Lostwithiel Primary School we teach children to read by teaching high quality systematic synthetic phonics. We use a programme called Read, Write, Inc. as a whole school approach to teaching early reading and writing, designed to ensure progress for every child. As children progress and can decode fluently they move onto the Literacy and Language scheme which develops children’s comprehension, vocabulary, writing, critical thinking and discussion skills and grammar – in a fun and meaningful way.
Read Write Inc Phonics is a method of teaching reading which is centered around learning the sounds of the letters (phonemes), and then blending them together to read words. The children also learn to break down words into individual sounds in order to write them (graphemes).
How it works
We start teaching phonics on day one at Lostwithiel Primary School. The children in our Tiny Trees Nursery access high quality phonics teaching daily ensuring they are ready to start school. The children are assessed at the start of the academic year and grouped according to their ability.
They work in small groups with a reading teacher.
At the end of each half term the children will be assessed again to check they have made progress and will be grouped again. In addition to the Read Write Inc programme the children will also be working on writing and storytelling skills in their classes with their own class teacher.
Reading
Using Read Write Inc the children learn to read effortlessly so that they can put all their energy into understanding what they read.
When using 'Read Write Inc' to read the children will:
- Learn 44 sounds and the corresponding letter/letter groups using simple picture prompts
- Learn to read words by blending the sounds together
- Read lively stories featuring words they have learnt to sound out
- Show that they understand the stories by answering 'Find It' and 'Prove it' discussion questions.
Blending
Children learn to build words from individual sounds and blending the sounds together in sequence.
(individual sounds shown further down the page).
Help your child learn to read words by sound-blending e.g. c-a-t = cat
Encourage children to say the pure sounds, as quickly as they can, and then to blend the sounds together to say the whole word.
Click on the useful links below to help with reading at home!