At Hill Farm, we follow the systematic synthetic phonics programme (SSP) Read Write Inc robustly as our approach to teaching early reading. This programme is taught with fidelity and progressively until children complete the programme in Year 2.
Our approach ensures that children build on their growing knowledge of the alphabetic code and are able to master phonics in order to read and spell as they move through school. It is our intent that children are confident to tackle any unfamiliar words when reading, develop stamina and resilience and to improve comprehension across the skills of reading as they move through Hill Farm and beyond.
Throughout their reading journey, children will be immersed in high-quality texts and we aim to foster, in all of our children, a love of books so that they become readers for life.
In Nursery, pupils will embark on their early reading journey in a rich, vocabulary-filled environment. Their speaking and listening skills will flourish through interactive role-play, child-led discussions, and thoughtfully planned sessions that encourage talk and sentence-building activities. A love for reading will be nurtured through exposure to a wide range of exciting core texts, with an environment that supports story retelling and encourages children to share their thoughts on the books they hear. Pupils will engage in sessions to develop phonological awareness, where pupils will engage in activities that help them distinguish and manipulate sounds, laying the foundation for reading success. Through games, songs, and playful exercises, children will practice sound discrimination, becoming familiar with different sounds in words and building the ability to recognise rhymes, syllables, and sound patterns. As the year progresses, pupils will begin to orally blend sounds, and in the final term, they will start learning initial sounds by linking them to letter shapes through the Read Write Inc. programme preparing them for Reception.
Gradually and in conjunction with pupils’ progressing phonic ability, children will develop through the Read, Write Inc stages throughout Reception and KS1, becoming confident and skilled readers.
The stages of the Read, Write Inc programme are set out into colours, consisting of a variety of fiction and non-fiction books in each coloured stage. Pupils accessing RWI will read a book on a particular stage, closely matched to their phonic ability. Our children are taught each day in small, teacher-led groups to learn sounds and reading skills according to their ability which is assessed each half term. To ensure pupils retain their knowledge of phonemes and graphemes, they spend 45 minutes daily on RWI phonics. By the time pupils reach Year Two, they should be confident decoders. In Year Two, children continue their phonic journey to becoming fluent and skilled readers through the RWI Comprehension programme.
Pupils who are not keeping up with their peers and where pupils have not yet mastered the English alphabetic code in Key Stage 2 access the one to one tutoring programme to ensure they catch up quickly.
Early Reading Journey
