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Summerhill Primary Academy

Phonics

Phonics at Summerhill

 

Here at Summerhill Primary, children learn to read, spell and write, through a lively, fun phonics programme, called ‘Read, Write, Inc.’ This is the systematic teaching of all the common sounds in the English language. Children are taught to recognise the sounds and to put them together, to sound-blend them, into words for reading. There are 3 main stages involved in the teaching of RWI Phonics, these are outlined below:

 

Stage 1:  Alongside ‘Fred the Frog,’ children learn how to read and write Speed Sounds Set 1, which consists of initial letter sounds and the clusters, th, ch, sh and qu. Children are learnt the pure sounds and not the letter names. Once each group of sounds have been taught, children learn how to blend these together, in order to read and write simple words.

 

Stage 2:  When all of Set 1 sounds have been learnt and children can blend them into words for reading, children complete Red Ditty books, which help them to read and spell simple words more fluently, together with the writing of simple sentences. At the same time, they learn Set 1 Green words, which are words from the Ditty, which children will be able to sound-blend together. They also learn ‘Rotten Red’ words, which are tricky words because they do not sound like they look, for example: said, you, the, of.

 

Stage 3:  When Ditty books have been completed, children move onto the storybooks, containing lively rhyming stories, which the children love to read! Alongside these, children learn Set 2 sounds followed by Set 3 sounds, which consist of all remaining sounds in the English language.

 

Children read the storybooks with their partner and are taught how to read with expression and fluency. They also learn how to answer simple questions about the text, in order to develop their comprehension skills.

 

Children are regularly assessed and are grouped accordingly, which means that all children regardless of their ability, achieve a high level of success becoming confident readers, writers and spellers.

 

To help support the phonics taught in school, parents are regularly invited into school to attend workshops, children will also bring home words to read and spell, each time they start a new Ditty book or new storybook.

 

Please click on our Parents section of the website to find some useful videos to help with your own understanding of phonics and sounds the children learn.