Phonics and Reading
At The Royal Kent School, we:
- Believe that all children can learn to read and most can learn to read well.
- Have an understanding of how children learn to read, issues they may have whilst doing so, and how we can support them.
- Agree that learning to decode is the key method that children need to grasp and master to become fluent readers.
- See fluency as the bridge between word recognition and comprehension.
- Aim to promote a love of reading, which will make the children avid readers for life.
Early Reading
In order to teach most children to read fluently:
- They need to develop their phonological awareness of different sounds
- They need to learn the sound-spelling correspondences in English, starting with the most common
- They need to learn that the roughly 44 sounds of our language are represented with spellings that can comprise one, two, three, four letters.
- They need to learn that a sound can be represented by different spellings and that a spelling can represent different sounds.
- They need to learn the phonemic awareness skills of segmenting and blending.
Our Early Reading strategy
At The Royal Kent School we teach phonics using the DfE validated 'Twinkl Phonics' programme. This is a synthetic phonics scheme, which helps children to acquire the phonics skills that they need to be able to access a text. It teaches children about segmenting and blending words, letter formation, spelling and gives them the ability to read longer texts.
As children move through the early stages of acquiring phonics skills, they practise by reading texts which are entirely decodable for them (only containing sounds and words that they have already learnt). The children will read from a range of different reading schemes, including ‘Twinkl Rhino Readers', 'Jelly and Bean', 'Bug Club Phonics', 'Collins Big Cat' and 'Songbird Phonics'. Our English subject leader Miss Webber personally sorts each book into phases and sets which correspond to what the children have learnt through Twinkl Phonics.
Once children have a secure knowledge of letter/sound correspondences, can blend words confidently and have successfully completed reading the phonetically decodable books from Phase 1-6, they will become a ‘Rainbow Reader'. This will mean that they will have a colour-banded book to read, these can be selected from a broad range of text types from different authors.
Once children can read fluently and with a good understanding, they self-select books for independent reading from the school library or from home.
More information on our expectations of reading at The Royal Kent School can be found here.
Reading walls
Below you will find a reading wall for each year group, which contains a suggested list of reading material suitable for this age group. These lists were created by Miss Webber, and children across the school, in autumn term 2023.