Reading at Spratton
We are passionate about reading! It is THE most important skill we teach as it enables access to the whole rest of the curriculum and learning.
Phonics and early reading
We start our reading journey in the first weeks of school. We learn Phonics using Little Wandle Letters and Sounds. It is a systematic programme to learn the sounds (phonemes) and letters (graphemes) that make up language in both spoken and written form. When we are 'sounding out' words in order to read them, this is called segmenting. When we put those sounds together to form a word, this is called blending. Blending and segmenting are the fundamental skills needed to 'decode' a word. Little Wandle have a fabulous website with a great section for parents to help them understand how children learn to read, and how they can help at home.
Visit it here: For parents | Letters and Sounds (littlewandlelettersandsounds.org.uk)
Developing reading
Once we can decode, we learn to read with increasing fluency. This involves learning all the tricky words (hard to decode) and being able to read some words by sight. Practise is key! We read lots in school and hopefully at home too.
Free reading
Once we are in Key Stage 2 we should be confident and fluent readers. The focus shifts to our comprehension skills and learning how to be a 'Good' reader who understands what they are reading in order to gain pleasure from it. We want all our children to be lifelong readers. Our library is well stocked with plenty of exciting titles to choose from. Novels are central to our English curriculum and are planned and sequenced so that we develop a rich knowledge of text types and authors. We log all our reading in our online reading journals on Serial Mash (part of Purple Mash).
Writing at Spratton
We develop writing alongside reading, with letter formations taught for all the graphemes that make up the sounds that spell our words. English is a complex language, therefore, spelling patterns are complex and varied. We teach these explicitly using the Purple Mash programme of spelling.
We learn to write cohesively, starting with simple sentences and then building our knowledge of grammar and punctuation to extend simple sentences into longer pieces of writing that make sense and are written for purpose, with an audience in mind. We teach writing in three phases which closely follow the Talk For Writing methodology developed by Pie Corbett. Find out more about Talk for Writing here: What is Talk for Writing? - Talk for Writing (talk4writing.com)
Find out more about our intention for the development of Reading and Writing at Spratton in our Curriculum Intent Documents below.