Phonics Intent, Implementation and Impact

Phonics is an approach to teaching reading, and some aspects of writing, by developing learners’ phonemic awareness. This involves the skills of hearing, identifying and using phonemes or sounds patterns in English. The aim is to systematically teach learners the relation between these sounds and written spelling patterns, or graphemes, which represent them. Phonics emphasises the skills of decoding new words by sounding them out and combining or ‘blending’ the sound- spelling patterns.

At Roman Way, we teach phonics using Little Wandle Letters and Sounds Revised which is a systematic and synthetic phonics programme to support early reading. Because we believe teaching every child to read is so important, we have a Reading Leader who drives the early reading programme in our school. This person is highly skilled at teaching phonics and reading, and monitors and supports our reading team, so everyone teaches with fidelity to the Little Wandle Letters and Sounds Revised programme. All the staff are trained in teaching this new scheme, ensuring the consistency is established from Reception to KS2. Weekly phonics CPD is delivered to all the staff by the Reading leader to coach and build the team. Phonics workshops are held for EYFS and KS1 parents in the Autumn term.

How is Phonics taught at RWA

We start teaching phonics in Nursery/Reception and follow the Little Wandle Letters and Sounds Revised progression, which ensures children build on their growing knowledge of the alphabetic code, mastering phonics to read and spell as they move through school. We want all our children are able to tackle any unfamiliar words as they read. We also model the application of the alphabetic code through phonics in shared reading and writing, both inside and outside of the phonics lesson and across the curriculum.

In Reception and KS1, pupils have phonics lesson at least once daily. From Year 2 onwards, teachers use the No Nonsense Spelling (NNS) scheme and Grammarsaurus (GRS) to support the teaching and learning of spellings to most of the pupils. SPAG lessons take place daily in Year 2 and at least 5 times over 2 weeks in KS2.

Summative assessment for Reception and Year 1 is used every six weeks to assess progress, to identify gaps in learning that need to be addressed, to identify any children needing additional support and to plan the Keep-up support that they need. The data is scrutinised through the Little Wandle Letters and Sounds Revised assessment tracker, to narrow attainment gaps between different groups of children and so that any additional support for teachers can be put into place and this is monitored by the Reading leader and the SLT.

Any child who needs additional practice in Reception and in KS1 has daily Keep-up support taught by a fully trained adult. We timetable daily phonics lessons for any child in Year 2 and above who is not fully fluent at reading or has not passed the Phonics Screening Check. These children urgently need to catch up, so the gap

Pupils in Year 1 also do the Phonics Screening Check (PSC) in June and the pupils in Year 2 who didn’t meet the expected score marks. This is a statutory test, set by the government, to assess children’s ability to decode words using phonics. To help the pupils achieve this, the pupils in Year 1 and in Year 2 do a mock PSC every term during assessment week so that their progress is measured and interventions can be put in place where needed.

For more information about this, please click on the link below:

Learning to read through phonics

Parent Guide: What is the Phonics Screening Check?

Reading Intent, Implementation and Impact

At Roman Way Academy, we value reading as a crucial life skill. We believe that all our children can become enthusiastic, fluent readers and writers. Our readers are equipped with the tools to tackle unfamiliar vocabulary. We encourage our children to see themselves as readers for both pleasure and purpose. By the time children leave us, they read confidently for meaning and regularly enjoy reading for pleasure. The children are introduced to enriched, high quality books, from a variety of cultures and in a range of different styles and formats including non-fiction, fiction, poetry and drama.

How we teach reading at RWA

All Reception and KS1 pupils engage in reading practice. Through shared and reading practice sessions, children experience good models of reading and reading discussion, using a variety of quality texts written for a range of purposes.

• In Reception and KS1, each child has ‘reading practice sessions’ three times a week.
• In Key Stage 2, pupils participate in whole class guided reading sessions and this happens 3 times a week as well.
• Quality texts are also chosen to share during daily reading for pleasure time.
• Younger children, children who do not get much support at home and those falling behind in their reading will have more frequent opportunities to read independently with an adult.

Resources for home reading