Reading
From the day children start at Minsterley School they are encouraged to develop a love of reading.
Essential Letters and Sounds
Essential Letters and Sounds (ELS) is our chosen Phonics programme. The aim of ELS is ‘Getting all children to read well, quickly’. It teaches children to read by identifying the phonemes (the smallest unit of sound) and graphemes (the written version of the sound) within words and using these to read words.
Children begin learning Phonics at the very beginning of Reception and it is explicitly taught every day during a dedicated slot on the timetable. Children are given the knowledge and the skills to then apply this independently.
Throughout the day, children will use their growing Phonics knowledge to support them in other areas of the curriculum and will have many opportunities to practise their reading. This includes reading 1:1 with a member of staff, with a partner during paired reading and as a class.
Children continue daily Phonics lessons in Year 1 and further through the school to ensure all children become confident, fluent readers.
We follow the ELS progression and sequence. This allows our children to practise their existing phonic knowledge whilst building their understanding of the ‘code’ of our language GPCs (Grapheme Phoneme Correspondence). As a result, our children can tackle any unfamiliar words that they might discover.
Children experience the joy of books and language whilst rapidly acquiring the skills they need to become fluent independent readers and writers. ELS teaches relevant, useful and ambitious vocabulary to support each child’s journey to becoming fluent and independent readers.
We begin by teaching the single letter sounds before moving to diagraphs ‘sh’ (two letters spelling one sound), trigraphs ‘igh’ (three letters spelling one sound) and quadgraphs ‘eigh’ (four letters spelling one sound).
We teach children to:
- Decode (read) by identifying each sound within a word and blending them together to read fluently
- Encode (write) by segmenting each sound to write words accurately.
The structure of ELS lessons allows children to know what is coming next, what they need to do, and how to achieve success. This makes it easier for children to learn the GPCs we are teaching (the alphabetic code) and how to apply this when reading.
ELS is designed on the principle that children should ‘keep up’ rather than ‘catch up’. Since interventions are delivered within the lesson by the teacher, any child who is struggling with the new knowledge can be immediately targeted with appropriate support. Where further support is required, 1:1 interventions are used where needed. These interventions are short, specific and effective.
Supporting Reading at Home:
- Children will read books that are entirely decodable, this means that they should be able to read these books as they already know the code contained within the book.
- We only use pure sounds when decoding words (no ‘uh’ after the sound)
- We want children to practise reading their book 4 times across the week working on these skills:
Decode – sounding out and blending to read the word.
Fluency – reading words with less obvious decoding.
Expression – using intonation and expression to bring the text to life!
We must use pure sounds when we are pronouncing the sounds and supporting children in reading words. If we mispronounce these sounds, we will make reading harder for our children. Please watch the videos below for how to accurately pronounce these sounds.
At the beginning of each academic year, we will hold an information session for parents and carers to find out more about what we do for Phonics, Reading and English at our schools. Please do join us.
More support for parents and carers can be found here:
https://home.oxfordowl.co.uk/reading/reading-schemes-oxford-levels/essential-letters-and-sounds/
VIDEOS FOR PRONUNCIATION
Phase 2 Essential Letters and Sounds
Phase 3 Essential Letters and Sounds
Phase 5 Essential Letters and Sounds
Accelerated Reader
From Years 1 to 6 the children’s reading development is enhanced by Accelerated Reader. This is a reading system which is designed to facilitate pupil reading growth and reading comprehension. Each child’s reading level is assessed through a standardised test which is then used to direct the pupils to an appropriate range of books based on their complexity.
Most of the school’s reading books have been levelled for their complexity using the ATOS reading formula which includes average sentence length, average word length, vocabulary grade level, and number of words in the book.
Once a child has read a book their understanding of the text is assessed by means of a computer-based quiz that tests their comprehension in a multiple choice format of 3-20 questions. This provides a range data that details their progress.
Writing
Children in the Early Years are encouraged to begin mark making using different writing materials. In their first year at Minsterley School children learn high frequency words and how to write VC (vowel/consonant) words and CVC (consonant/vowel/consonant) words as specified in ‘Letters and Sounds.’ Teachers and teaching assistants plan a wide range of engaging writing activities which encourage children to write freely and independently. The children are taught the Early Years Foundation Stage for literacy.
From Year 1 the children are taught literacy in accordance with the National Curriculum Programme of Study. This ensures that the children are taught all of the skills which they need to be confident writers:
Writing Transcription (spelling)
Handwriting
Vocabulary, grammar and punctuation
Writing Composition (including planning, drafting, evaluating, editing, proof reading and publishing.)
We use Pathways to Write across school to support with the structure of teaching and learning in English.
English at Minsterley an overview 2023
