Burnham-on-Sea Infant School

'Nurturing Minds, Growing Potential, Enriching Futures'

Early Reading and Phonics Curriculum Overview

Curriculum Lead: Tim Richards

‘Reading makes all other learning possible. We have to get books into our children’s hands early and often.’ Barack Obama 

Our vision is for all children to become confident, fluent readers, who develop a true love of reading.
We want to ensure that every child leaves primary school with a deep love of books, enjoyment of reading and a thirst for knowledge. We know that developing children as lifelong readers is a fundamental entitlement for every child as reading opens the door to opportunities. Reading is a journey that starts with children learning to read and develops into children being able to read in order to learn. We are committed to ensuring our children get off to the best start in education through reading.

We understand that in order to love reading, children need the skills to access texts with automaticity and fluency. 

In order to be competent readers who can confidently access and enjoy texts, children must be explicitly taught strategies to help them to fully understand what they are reading. We teach comprehension through a carefully curated progression of skills so that children can access texts for both pleasure and information. Comprehension sessions have a specific focus on a particular content domain taken from the National Curriculum reading framework.

At Burnham on Sea Infant School, we use the Unlocking Letters and Sounds (ULS) programme to begin our children’s reading and writing journey. ULS is a method of learning to read through letter sounds and synthetic phonics and it has proven to get children off to a flying start.  All children throughout Early Years and KS1 follow the ULS programme to ensure a systematic approach to the teaching of this es­sential part of learning to read. 

All adults in school have had specific and specialised training in ULS. All of our ULS lessons are taught using a consistent and repeated approach. 

• Recite the alphabet
• Recall the grapheme phoneme correspondence (GPC's) already learnt
• Recall the common exception words (CEW's_ already learnt
• Revisit blending to read using previously taught GPC's
• Revisit oral blending
• Teach new GPC's
• Practise blending to read with new GPC
• Practise segmenting for spelling using new GPC
• Apply the new GPC's by reading and writing words
• Revise to assess the new knowledge taught

Phonics helps children read unfamiliar words by pronouncing each sound in the word one at a time. Children can start blending sounds into words as soon as they know a small group of letters well. During lessons, children are taught to hear sounds and blend them together in sequence to make a word. We start with blending oral sounds, then progress to reading the letters and blending them together to read the word.

When teaching the children, we ensure they say the ‘pure’ sounds. 

More information about the progression and sequence of teaching and supporting resources can be found in the links below.

It is expected that by the time children are in Year two they will have progressed through all the phonics phases. 

In June, all Year 1 children complete a phonics screening check which is a short assessment to assess children’s phonics ability in decoding unknown words (also known as alien words) to an appropriate standard. The test consists of 40 words using a variety of phonemes and graphemes that they have been taught. These words consist of real and nonsense words.  Pupils who do not reach the expected standard in Year 1 will be provided with additional phonics support and intervention in order to allow them to meet the expected standard in Year 2.

• Year 1 Parents Workshop.pptx
• reading books letter to parents.docx
• Phonics vocab sheet.pdf
• Phonics workshop March 2024.pptx

Unlocking Letters and Sounds Supporting Resources

• ULS Progression.pdf
• ULS Phase 2 Actions, Images and Handwriting.pdf
• ULS Phase 3 Actions, Images and Handwriting.pdf
• Phase 2 and 3 Flashcards.pdf
• Phase 5 Flashcards.pdf
• Phase 2 sounds mat.pdf
• Phase 3 sounds mat.pdf
• Phase 5 sounds mat.pdf
• Common exception words.pdf
• Phase 2 CEW mat.pdf
• Phase 3 CEW mat.pdf
• Phase 4 CEW mat.pdf
• Phase 5 CEW mat.pdf

Supporting Reading at Home

• reading_at_home.docx
• reading-with-your-child-booklet-for-parents-4-6.pdf
• The importance of reading - information for parents.pptx

Reading | Oxford Owl from Oxford University Press

www.oxfordowl.co.uk

Oxford Owl Reading has 250 free eBooks for you to share with your child as well as simple ideas, top tips, activities and games to help your child with their reading .  https://www.oxfordowl.co.uk/welcome-back/for-home/reading-owl/reading

 

Reading Rockets

www.readingrockets.org

Offers strategies, lessons,activities and ideas designed to help young children learn to read.  

http://www.readingrockets.org/

 

How to read with your child | Book Trust

www.booktrust.org.uk

How to read with your child Research proves that children who enjoy reading do better at school in all subjects. Reading together increases literacy skills and does .  

http://www.booktrust.org.uk/books/children/how-to-share-books/