Reading and Phonics
At St Peter’s Church of England Primary School, we believe that the acquisition of language and communication skills should hold the utmost importance as the vast majority of our pupils have English as an additional language, and so the teaching of all aspects of English is given high priority. We provide opportunities for the children to develop their spoken language, reading and writing skills in English lessons and across the curriculum. At St Peter’s, we have developed a bespoke curriculum to incorporate quality and engaging texts to interest and inspire our children as readers.
Reading is at the heart of our curriculum, as we firmly believe that it is the key to success in all subject areas, and leads us to opportunities in the wider world. The children are immersed in reading the moment they join us in our EYFS setting.
We believe that in order for children to engage with ‘reading for pleasure’, they need to become confident readers in the first instance, gaining satisfaction for decoding words. We enable our children to do this through a systematic synthetic phonics programme. Our phonics lesson planning and delivery follows the ‘Bug Club Phonics' programme, alongside our own planning documentation and resources, which are led by a multi-sensory approach. 'Bug Club phonics' introduces phonemes and graphemes systematically, thus enabling pupils to practise and build upon the phonics taught in class.
The Bug Club phonics scheme, alongside our own planning and delivery structure meets the most recent core criteria (April 2021), provided by the DFE, which states that the scheme should be centred around, ‘a complete SSP programme providing fidelity to its teaching framework’, and ‘present systematic, synthetic phonics work as the prime approach to decoding print’.
Alongside the teaching of word reading, we deliver guided reading sessions from EYFS-Year 6 to teach skills needed for fluency and the comprehension of texts. This is delivered using the 'Bug Club Guided' programme, which allows for consistency and progression following on from 'Bug Club phonics'.
Additionally, we deliver whole class comprehension lessons weekly, and reading for pleasure opportunities daily, and throughout the school year. We view home reading as an approach to consolidating reading skills/strategies and involving parents with their child’s reading progress and enjoyment.
At St Peter's Church of England Primary School, we share the belief that we are all 'readers' and support every child in reaching their full potential.
Further information can be found on our English Page.
Please see the Phonics Workshop Presentation below: