Phonics

At St. Mary's we use the Letters and Sounds phonics program to teach the children to learn to read and spell.  This is the Government published program where sounds are taught in a structured, systematic way. Phonics lessons are taught daily and are about 20 minutes in length and are very interactive, appealing to the different ways that children learn providing visual, aural, kinesthetic prompts for learning.

In Bluebell Class our foundation stage children learn 44 phonemes and some tricky words.  The tricky words are the most commonly used irregularly spelt words that appear in written texts.  You can find out more about how reading and writing is taught in Bluebell Class on their class page.

In Windmill Class our key stage 1 children consolidate the first 44 phonemes learned in previous year and progress to learning alternative spellings for long vowel sounds and different ways of pronouncing letters and combinations of letters they already know.  They learn more about the conventions of spelling including prefixes and suffixes and spelling rules including doubling and dropping letters.

Reading Books  

Follifoot Farm is the reading scheme that we use in school.  This is one of the recommended phonic schemes and it is supplemented with other phonic based books including Oxford Songbirds, traditional tales and project x.

Learning to read is a partnership between home and school and daily reading practice at home is essential for all children to learn to read fluently.  It is important for children of all ages to read aloud and to talk about what they read in terms of comprehending the text and developing their knowledge of vocabulary.  All children have a home to school reading log and teachers find the comments parents make in them very useful.