Curriculum Intent

At St Thomas’s Centre we recognise the vital importance of reading for children’s future opportunities. With this in mind, we strive to teach children to read and write both effectively and quickly. The ability to efficiently decode is essential and therefore our aim is to teach the core skills of segmenting and blending through the systematic teaching of phonics. We want children to understand the relationship between sounds and letters, recognising that the letters on the page represent the sounds in spoken words. Our aim is for children to make sustained progress in learning to read fluently and write with confidence in an enjoyable way. These fundamental skills not only hold the key to the rest of the curriculum, but also have a huge impact on children’s self-esteem and future life chances.

Our school has chosen Read Write Inc as our systematic, synthetic phonics programme to teach early reading and spelling.  The children progress through the Read Write Inc programme until they can read fluently.

Using Read Write Inc Phonics, pupils will:

• develop their vocabulary through role play and discussion
• develop speaking and listening skills
• learn the grapheme-phoneme correspondences (GPCs) in a clear sequence, from the simple alphabetic code, to phonemes with alternative graphemes
• learn to decode words by identifying the graphemes and blending the phonemes using Fred Talk (e.g. c-a-t)
• learn to spell words by segmenting them into phonemes
• make phonetically plausible attempts to spell words correctly
• write simple sentences with confidence
• select the correct GPC for words that contain sounds that have more than one GPC (eg. ay, ai, a-e)
• read red words and common exception words quickly and correctly
• spell red words and common exception words accurately

High priority is given to reading throughout school. Children take part in reading practise sessions at least three times a week, daily story time and where necessary one-to-one reading. We aim to develop a love of reading with every child, with the hope that they each become lifelong readers.

All classrooms have inviting and exciting reading areas with subject specific books and other age-appropriate ‘reading for pleasure’ books. Pupils are encouraged to use this area to choose, read and interact with books in an enjoyable way. We use books across many areas of the curriculum and story time is timetabled daily.