Collins eBook Hub

Thank you to those parents that attended our Collins eBook parent workshops in October 2024. Please find the presentation below and do note hesitate to contact us if you have queries. 

Early Reading and Phonics

We are passionate about reading, meaning it lies at the heart of our curriculum. We believe the greatest gift we can give to our children is the love of reading. We therefore strive to ensure that every child leaves us not only with the ability to read easily, fluently and with a comprehensive understanding, but with a real desire for books. We want all of our children to read for pleasure, having had access to a wide range of text types, genres and authors so that they can make informed opinions about their favourite texts.

Developing Early Reading Skills

We understand that learning to read is a journey. An incredibly important journey that is well-rehearsed, well-practised and starts by allowing children to develop key communication and language skills. These key skills are crucial in providing the foundations that will give children the best future literacy success.

At Hamworthy, children begin this journey in Nursery using some of the following activities - 

Environmental Sounds

We encourage children to listen for sounds around them and we model describing them too. "I can hear the sticks snapping under my feet" , "I can hear the train going clickety-clack"

Rhythm and Rhyme 

We encourage children to practise listening for and joining in with rhymes including rhyming stories and nursery rhymes.

Alliteration

We encourage children to listen for the initial sound of objects and then find and match all objects that begin with the same sound. "spider, sock, sellotape, scissors."

Speaking and Listening 

We model good speaking and listening with children. Talking and interacting with our youngest children acts as an important foundation for later Literacy skills. All of these interactions will significantly expand children's vocabulary. we show children how to be good listeners too by encouraging eye contact, not interrupting when someone is speaking and asking appropriate questions and commenting on what the other person has said.

Sharing Stories

We share stories together which will encourage a love of reading and teaches children how to hold a book, turn the pages, know that print runs from left to right and expands their vocabulary. We repeat favourite stories over and over again which deepens children's familiarity and engagement. This also allows children more chance to explore the language, characters and emotions and are therefore more likely to join in and retell the story independently.

Oral Blending

We encourage children to listen for the sounds within a word and push them together to form the whole word. Using the pure sounds makes it easier for children to merge them together. 

Oral Segmenting

We encourage children to break up a word into its sounds. For example we say the word 'hat' and the children will tell us the sounds they hear - h/a/t.

Phonics

The schools use the Government validated systematic synthetic phonics scheme 'Little Wandle' for the early teaching of reading and writing.  

We teach reading through phonics. Phonics is taught as a stand a lone session on a daily basis. We have adopted a systematic synthetic approach using the 'Little Wandle Letters and Sounds Revised' programme. All this means is that each unknown word is able to be sounded out and then blended back together in order to be able to read the word. The letters are taught in an order that quickly allows the children to be able to put the sounds together and read words.  As well as teaching the children the skills of blending (putting sounds together to read) and segmenting (breaking words down to spell), we also teach children 'tricky words'. These are words that are able to be sounded out but do not follow the normal rules. Children are taught the 'trick' in the word to support their reading and spelling. 

Children will start to learn phonics as soon as they start in Reception at Twin Sails. The Reception curriculum focuses on teaching children the first letter sounds which are broken down into manageable groups known as phases. In Reception, children will be taught the first 4 phases of the 'Little Wandle' programme which will enable them to be able to read and write simple words and sentences. By the end of Reception, we aim for all of our children to be secure in the first 4 phases which will give them solid foundations for the work they will continue in Year One. When children join Reception, parents will be invited to a workshop where the teachers will explain the phonics curriculum, model the skills of segmenting and blending, and support parents in helping their children to read at home.

In Year One, children will continue to be taught phonics on a daily basis, in line with the 'Little Wandle' programme.  Year One phonics will heavily focus on phase 5 of the programme, where children will be taught the alternative spellings for sounds they already know, for example, 'ee' (feet) can also be made using 'ea' (eat).  Children will also start to look at common spelling patterns - spelling plurals and suffixes -ing endings and -ed endings. All children in Year One will take part in the national phonics screening during a specific week in June. Parents will be notified of when this will take place, so please remember not to book any holidays. Any child who did not take the test or did not pass it in Year One will retake the test in Year Two.

The children in Year Two will revisit Phase 5 of the 'Little Wandle' programme in the Autumn term. The main focus here is placed on teaching children spelling patterns. Children will be taught the many different rules for spelling plurals and adding prefixes and suffixes to words.

VIPERS

We teach children reading comprehension skills through a programme known as VIPERS. Each of the VIPERS letters stands for a different skill that children will learn and use during their daily VIPERS sessions. These skills enable children to unpick different elements of a text and are crucial in allowing children to gain a deep understanding of what they are reading. VIPERS sessions are of huge importance and are pivotal in allowing children to gain a deep and meaningful understanding of the English language, whilst extending their vocabulary.

V = Vocabulary

I = Inference

P = Prediction

E = Explain

R = Retrieval

S = Sequence/Summarise