Phonics & Spelling

Intent

• All children at Alston Primary School will learn to read with accuracy and fluency, regardless of their background, needs or abilities.
• Children will leave Key Stage 1 with the reading skills to enable them to access the Key stage curriculum.

Implementation

• Use of the Read, Write, Inc (RWI) scheme to teach phonic skills throughout the school.

• Daily RWI in Reception, Year 1 and 2 until they complete the programme. Children are placed in groups based on a half termly assessment to ensure the teaching they receive is specific to them.
• 1 to 1 tutoring targeting unique gaps in the lowest, slowest progress children (Years R to 6).
• Coaching for all reading teachers, as required, by the Reading Leader.
• Practice Sessions, delivered weekly, by the Reading Leader.
• Development Days with RWI consultant each term.
• Half termly assessments to assess children’s phonics and reading ability.
• Afternoon phonics lesson focusing on accurate decoding.
• Year 1 RWI PSC assessments (Nov, Feb, May) to inform planning of afternoon sessions.
• Daily Story Time to embed pleasure for reading and a love of books across the whole school.

Impact

• All pupils including the weakest readers make sufficient progress to meet or exceed ARE. (See RWI expectations grid).
• High quality phonics teaching delivered by all reading teachers.
• Increase in the % of children who achieve the Early Learning Goals for Comprehension, Word Reading and Writing.
• All pupils to reach the required standard in the PSC.

Phonics at Alston 2021-22

• The national PSC was cancelled in both the summer of 2020 and 2021. The current Year 2 will all sit a PSC in November/ December 2021. Children not reaching the required standard will receive targeted support to help them to improve their phonic skills. They will then take the summer 2022 PSC.
• The current Year 1 will all sit the PSC in June 2022. Those not reaching the threshold will resit the check in the summer of 2023, when they are in Year 2

Click for more about RWI Phonics

At Alston we use the Read Write Inc Phonics programme produced by Ruth Miskin and Oxford University Press for the teaching of our discrete phonics lessons.

Through this we are able to deliver a multi-sensory phonics, reading and writing programme of learning.

The key principles of this scheme are –

Pace, purpose, praise and passion.

Phonics is taught daily in EYFS and Key Stage 1.  Children are grouped by ability so they learn rapidly at the right level.

To support the teaching of reading we use the RWI Phonics fully decodable books (fiction and non-fiction titles), which match clearly to each of the 3 speed set sound groups.

Speed set 1	Speed set 2	Speed set 3