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- office@cedars.milton-keynes.sch.uk
At Cedars Primary School and Nursery, we value reading as a key life skill and one that lays the foundations for lifelong learning. We want every child to learn to decode quickly and accurately so that reading becomes effortless. This enables children to develop their comprehension so that they can then read for pleasure.
At Cedars we use The Read, Write Inc. programme which is a systematic, synthetic phonics programme that explicitly teaches children to read fluently and accurately. Read, Write, Inc phonics provides the foundations of learning to make the development into fluent reading and writing easier. Children learn to read fluently and at speed so they can focus on developing their skills in comprehension, vocabulary and spelling. Through RWI phonics children learn a simple alphabetic code followed by a more complex code. All reading books progress cumulatively, matched to the sounds children are learning and already know. The teaching of phonics is a high priority.
The staff at Cedars have been trained to deliver the Read, Write Inc phonics programme regardless of Key Stage or role in school. Children start RWInc phonic lessons from the first week they start in Reception, and have daily lessons across EYFS – year 2. Children in Nursery begin developing their early reading skills as soon as they start in Nursery and begin the RWI Nursery programme in the Summer term. In each RWI lesson the children learn a new sound and read corresponding words. The children also revisit previously taught sounds and words and spell words with these sounds. When the children can blend independently they also read a storybook that is matched specifically to the sounds that they have learnt.
We assess children every half term and place them into appropriate phonics groups with other children at a similar challenge level. Our school is committed to ensuring every pupil will learn to read, regardless of their background, needs or abilities.
The lowest 20% of children are identified from our rigorous assessments and targeted for daily one-to-one tuition to help them “keep up, not catch up”. The Read, Write Inc reading books that the children access at school and those that they take home are matched to the children’s phonic knowledge and so are fully decodable. Children are given a ‘book bag book’ each week to take home and are expected to read this five times. Children will be able read this book with accuracy and fluency as they re-read the text over the week.
At Cedars, we have clear expectations of pupils’ phonics progress which is outlined in the following table.
At Cedars we aim for all our children to become fluent, confident readers who are passionate about reading.
Children who read regularly or are read to regularly have the opportunity to open the doors to so many different worlds! More importantly, reading will give your child the tools to become independent life-long learners.
We achieve this through:
A program to teach phonics skills
Teaching reading skills through VIPERS
Encouraging children to develop a love of books by reading to them daily Giving children access to a wide range of books at school and for home
Read Write Inc (RWI) is a systematic phonics programme which helps all children learn to read fluently and at speed so they can focus on developing their skills in comprehension, vocabulary and spelling. We begin the programme in Reception and will continue teaching RWI to children beyond Key Stage 1 if they still need support in their reading.
All children are assessed regularly so they work with children at the same level and lessons are pitched exactly to individual children’s needs. All children in Reception, Year 1 and Year 2 have a daily 30 min phonics lesson.
Reading
The children:
Writing
The children:
Talking
The children work in pairs so that they:
Children learn the sounds in 3 different sets; Set 1, Set 2 and Set 3.
As well as learning to read and blend real words children will have plenty of opportunities to apply their sound recognition skills on reading ‘Nonsense words’. These words will also feature heavily in the Year One Phonics Screening check in the summer term.
Throughout RWInc children will read red and green words. Red words are words that are not easily decodable and Green words are linked to the sounds they have been learning and are easily decodable. Children begin by learning to Fred Talk these words before learning to recognise them by sight. When children first read Green words, the sounds are marked with dots and dashes to represent the sound each letter makes and support children with sounding then blending the words. These green and red words are also contained in the books that children read during phonics lessons and books that are taken home.