Phonics and Reading

At St Jude’s we are passionate that a love of reading should be encouraged and fostered every day.

Reading helps us to acquire new knowledge and understand the world around us. It is through reading that we access all the other subjects and it plays a vital role in academic success and achievement across the curriculum.

Reading is taught as a whole class session, adopting the principles for Teaching for Mastery. Every child from Year 2 upwards experiences a daily reading lesson and all children access the same text.

Children in Reception and Year 1 classes continue to read in small groups to allow for decoding practice.

Whole class reading allows all children to develop a deep understanding of the text that they are reading, the layout of the text and the language used within the text.

The learning needs of every child are met through pre-teaching of vocabulary and the use of the same text for a week.

Reading Roles (created by Aidan Severs) are used to highlight reading strategies to children; a single strategy is the focus of each reading session though others may be used to support learning of that strategy.

In Early Years and Key Stage 1 a rigorous programme of phonics is followed in order to provide children with decoding and spelling skills that help them as they move up the school. We currently follow the Letters and Sounds phonics teaching document.

For more information on how our English Reading Curriculum is planned and taught across the year groups, please click on the below links:

The school has chosen Little Wandle Letters and Sounds at its accredited Systematic, Synthetic Phonics programme from the DfE accredited list. The aim is to train staff on the programme in November 2021 and implement the programme in December 2021. Until then we are following  Letters and Sounds (2007) in a consistent manner with children who are learning phonics reading only fully decodable books.