At Lowca Community School, we believe that learning to read is one of the most pivotal skills we can teach children, as this provides the doorway to all future and lifelong learning. Children learn to read in the EYFS and are normally fluent by the end of the Year 1. After this, children continue to develop a love of reading and focus on their comprehension skills to help them explore learning and understanding of texts. To teach reading we use a Synthetic Phonics Program called Read Write Inc.
What is Read Write Inc?
Read Write Inc. (RWI) teaches synthetic phonics in a structured and exciting way. Children will start the scheme during the final term of Nursery and will work through the scheme until they can read confidently, fluently and with good comprehensive understanding. The scheme also supports children’s writing, giving them the tools to spell and compose.
What is synthetic phonics?
When your child is learning to read there are two crucial aspects to learn:
– the sounds represented by written letters
– how to blend the sounds together to make words.
Synthetic Phonics is a way of teaching reading.
Children are taught to read letters or groups of letters by saying the sound(s) they represent; for example, they are taught that the letter ‘l’ sounds like llllll when we say it. Children can then start to read words by blending the sounds together to make a word. There are 26 letters of the alphabet but they make 44 sounds.
Who is Fred?
Fred is a (toy) frog and Fred can’t read! He can only say words in pure sounds. We use ‘Fred talk’ to help blend the sounds together in words to help Fred to read. We then move onto ‘Fred in your head’ to increase our fluency. The children can’t use the skill of ‘Fred Talk’ or ‘Fred in your head’ for all words, as some do not follow the phonics rule. For example, ‘the’ ‘are’ and ‘some’. Therefore, these are taught as Red words within Read, Write, Inc. We teach them as sight words and the more children are exposed to them, the more they are instilled in their long term memory.
How is RWI taught?
All children are assessed regularly by our RWI lead. From these assessments, children are grouped into stages where they work alongside their peers on the same stage.
Sounds – The children are taught the sounds in 3 sets.
Step 1:
Set 1 Sounds are taught in the following order together with rhymes to help children form the letters correctly and instantly recognise sounds ready for blending.
Step 2:
The children are then taught Set 2 Sounds – the long vowels. When they are very confident with all of set 1 and 2 they are taught Set 3 Sounds.
Nonsense words (Alien words)!
As well as learning to read and blend real words, children will have many opportunities to apply their sound recognition skills on reading ‘Nonsense words’. ‘These words provide endless opportunities for children to apply and practice their decoding skills, which will further aid their ability to read unfamiliar words they may come across in the future.
Step 3:
In each RWI session/focus book, children will be exposed to red and green words. Red words are words that are not easily or not at all decodable, and will extend children’s vocabulary. Green words are linked to the sounds they have been learning and are easily decodable.
During the sequence of RWI sessions, children will read their storybook several times and at each new reading, they will have plenty of opportunities to practise using their developing comprehension skills.
Your child may put dashes underneath some words to represent certain sounds.
At some point in your child’s reading journey, you may have heard them repeating a familiar phrase: ‘hold a sentence’. ‘Hold a sentence’ is a taught skill that encourages children to remember a whole sentence while focusing on key spelling and punctuation rules. The skill of holding a sentence acts as a preconditional skill to early writing.
Common Questions
How will my child be taught to read?
We start by teaching phonics to the children in the Reception class. This means that they learn how to ‘read’ the sounds in words and how those sounds can be written down. This is essential for reading, but it also helps children learn to spell well. We teach the children simple ways of remembering these sounds and letters. Ask them to show you what these are.
The children also practise reading (and spelling) what we call ‘tricky words’, such as ‘once,’ ‘have,’ ‘said’ and ‘where’.
How will I know how well my child is doing?
We will always let you know how well your child is doing. We use various ways to find out how the children are getting on in reading. We then use the information to decide what reading group they should be in. Your child will work with children who are at the same reading level as him or her. Children will move to a different group if they are making faster progress than the others. Your child will have access to one-to-one support if we think he or she needs some support to keep up (we use the term keep up not catch up)
In the summer term, the government asks us to do a phonics check of all the Year 1 children. That gives us extra information about their progress. We will talk to you about how well your child has done, or if we have any concerns.
How long will it take to learn to read well?
By the end of Year 2, your child should be able to read aloud books that are at the right level for his or her age. In Year 3 we concentrate more on helping children to understand what they are reading, although this work begins very early on. This happens when the teacher reads to the children and also when the children read their own story book.
How do I know the teaching will be good?
All the staff have been trained to teach Read Write Inc. We believe that it is very important that all the teachers and teaching assistants work in the same way. The staff are also coached by our RWI lead and we have weekly meetings and coaching sessions.
What can I do to help? Is there anything that I shouldn’t do?
You will be invited to a meeting so that we can explain how we teach reading. Please come and support your child. We would very much like you to know how to help.
Your child will bring different sorts of books home from school. It helps if you know whether this is a book that your child can read on their own or whether this is a book that you should read to them. The teacher will have explained which is which. Please trust your child’s teacher to choose the book(s) that will help your child the most.
Help your child to sound out the letters in words and then to blend the sounds together to make a whole word. Try not to refer to the letters by their names. Help your child to focus on the sounds. You can hear how to say the sounds correctly at this link:
Sometimes your child might bring home a picture book that they know well. Please don’t say, ‘This is too easy.’ Instead, encourage your child to tell you the story out loud; ask them questions about things that happen or what they think about some of the characters in the story.
We know parents and carers are very busy people. But if you can find time to read to your child as much as possible, it helps him or her to learn about books and stories. They also learn new words and what they mean. Show that you are interested in reading yourself and talk about reading as a family.
Reading books are changed every Friday and your child will bring home two books, a story book and a book bag book. The story book will be what they have read in class that week so will therefore boost their confidence and enable them to try out expression and understand the story etc rather than focusing on the spelling. The book bag book will be linked to the sounds they have been taught that week. If your child is struggling to read a word, please don’t do it for them and rush the process, encourage them to Fred talk the word (set 1) or special friends, Fred talk, read the word.
Miss High is our RWI lead and is always available via Email to answer and questions or concerns: FH@lowca.cumbria.sch.uk