Early Reading and Phonics
Reading at Bow Community Primary School
Early Reading
At Bow Community Primary School, we believe that reading is an essential life skill and the key to all learning. We are committed to enabling our learners to become lifelong readers.
At the heart of our strategy is our mission to foster a love of reading. We aim to provide children with a language-rich environment, high quality texts and inspiring learning opportunities, which will help them to:
- Engage with a wide range of different text types.
- Read accurately, fluently and with understanding.
- Be able to read with expression, clarity and confidence.
- Develop a good linguistic knowledge of vocabulary and grammar.
- Gain a life-long enjoyment of reading and books.
We want:
- Every pupil to learn to read, regardless of their background, needs or abilities.
- All pupils, including those who find reading more difficult, to make good progress.
- Children to develop vocabulary, language comprehension and a love of reading through stories, poems, rhymes and non-fiction tex
- Children to become familiar with and enjoy listening to, a wide range of stories, poems, rhymes and non-fiction texts.
- Children to read daily, both in school and at home.
- Children to rehearse reading and re-reading books that match the grapheme-phoneme correspondences they know, both in school and at home.
Phonics
At Bow Community Primary School, we believe that all our children can become fluent readers and writers. We believe that speaking, listening, reading and writing are fundamental life skills, which enable children to communicate effectively.
Our teachers teach robust phonics lessons, using ‘Twinkl Phonics’, which is an approved, systematic and synthetic phonics programme, that ensures children build on their growing knowledge of the alphabetic code and master phonics to read and spell, as they move through school.
For more information, please follow this link:
Classroom Teaching Toolkit Resources (twinkl.co.uk)
Ongoing assessment of pupils’ phonics progress is sufficiently frequent and detailed to identify any pupil who is falling behind the programme’s pace. If they do fall behind, targeted support is given immediately.
Language Rich Environment
We have a strong focus on language development at Bow Community Primary School because we know that speaking and listening are crucial skills for reading and writing in all subjects. We recognise the importance of vocabulary in creating a language rich environment. We rehearse vocabulary through:
- Speaking in full sentences.
- Reading aloud with one another.
- Participating in role-play activities and opportunities to be imaginative.
- Displaying Word Walls and pupil voice in our classrooms.
- Taking time to explore language and vocabulary at every opportunity.