Reading and Phonics
Reading
A love for reading
At Howard Community Academy we strive to promote a love of reading for all. All pupils are encouraged daily to read widely across both fiction and non- fiction to develop their knowledge of themselves and the world around them. We support and guide the children to foster a love of reading through reading high quality, age-appropriate texts that are linked to the curriculum, represent a range of diverse backgrounds and experiences and reflect the children’s personal choice in what they read.
To further inspire a love for reading, children have access to our library and take a books home regularly, have regular reading for pleasure opportunities, all classrooms have book corners where books are selected on appropriate age, to support our topics and linked to relevant assemblies. We also have regular reading for pleasure assemblies where staff members share their love for reading choosing books that engage the children.
The love for reading is shared with our families by children sharing their reading books at home, having termly reading cafes for parents to learn about different areas relating to reading such as comprehension and phonics. Children also get the opportunity to win a trip into a book shop and being able to select a book for themselves, by gaining tickets every week when they read 4 times or more at home with an adult and their reading diary is signed. Tickets are collected weekly and names are put into a jar for our half termly assembly.
Teaching reading
From Nursery the children are taught how to share a book with adults, learning how to hold a book and turn a page, talk about what they can see in the books as well as having regular foundations for phonics sessions where children have a rhyme time every day learning listening skills, rhyming, syllables and sound knowledge through games.
In Reception the children have reading sessions with an adult using books that are phonetically decodable and support the development of reading skills such as blending and fluency.
In Year 1 and 2 the children continue to have small group reading sessions where the children develop their ability to blend words in their head, increase fluency and prosody and have language rich discussions about things they have read and answer questions.
Across Key Stage 2 the children work in their classes to develop language acquisition skills, developing their vocabulary and understanding of a range of words including topic reading.
Phonics
Phonics
Little Wandle Phonics programme is our chosen systematic synthetic phonics programme which starts formally in Reception. In Nursery, the Little Wandle Foundations programme is used. These early phonics resources give children an initial exposure to the sounds and oral blending, which are fundamental for success in Phonics. They learn sounds in a playful and meaningful way and focus on developing the foundations for phonics, language and the love of reading ready for formal phonics teaching in Reception.
The basis of Little Wandle is to build on children’s knowledge of the alphabetic code. This code knowledge if used to apply the skills of; blending for reading and segmenting for spelling so that children can master reading and spelling as they move through school. In the programme, the learners gain an enriched vocabulary and develop their comprehension in the process of learning to read, spell and write in the English language.
Progression is carefully mapped out by the Little Wandle programme, through in the classroom displays and the weekly reading practice sessions. We follow the rigorous application of the teaching and learning cycle using cumulative code, words, sentences, spelling and reading books to apply the skills learnt. Reading Practice sessions take place alongside the phonics programme three times a week, providing groups of children with the opportunity to practice their decoding, prosody and comprehension skills in a supportive, teacher-led session.
Little Wandle and parents
Little Wandle have a section of their website which is set up to enable parents support their children whilst learning phonics. It has a wealth of videos to watch, blogs to read and resources that can be used at home.