Reading and Phonics

Our Phonics Scheme is called 'Collins Big Cat Phonics - Songs of Sounds.'

Songs of Sounds is a multi-sensory programme, with kinaesthetic, auditory and visual activities that reinforce skills through a variety of learning styles. It is carefully differentiated, containing support and challenge to cater for every child. It is a highly active approach with a song to help children remember every phoneme and whole-body actions to aid learning.

To find out more visit https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p8_FTfOaZ6s

To listen to part of the song visit https://soundcloud.com/collins-ed/collins-big-cat-song-of-sounds

For more phonics information and resources, please click here to see our parents phonics workshop.

We encourage parents to used Paired reading to help their child to read at home. It’s one of the best ways to improve reading skills. Research has shown that children that do paired reading improve three times faster than children who do not do paired reading.

Here is a video clip of how to do Paired reading with your child at home.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=rR8LWdDEZkY

Our Reading Scheme: We follow the Collins Big Cat Phonics which is linked to our Phonics Scheme, Songs of Sounds. Addtionally we use colour banded books from Pearson Bug Club, various series from Oxford Publishing and Badger Books.

This means children bring home reading books that are a mix of phonics based/fluency and comprehension books that go across a wide variety of genres.

Children, where appropriate, will come home with books that support each phonics unit being taught and a book designed to help fluency/comprehension. Your child’s teacher will send home phonics books each week linked to either the current sound or sound(s) they have recently learnt.

As your child will have the phonic book for a week, we have compiled a selection of activities that you could use to support their reading and use of phonics at home:

Read the book and identify the target sound.
Play hunt the sound – get your child to identify how one sound (phoneme) can have different spellings (graphemes). E.g. the ay sound can be represented by ai, a-e, a, ae, ey, ea, eigh, aigh.
Play hunt the spelling – get your child to identify how one spelling (grapheme) can have different sounds (phonemes). E.g. the oo spelling can represent oo as in book and oo as in moon.
Retell the story, perhaps through drama, using as many of the target sound words identified in previous reading.
Discuss an alternative ending encouraging children to use words that include the target sound.
Using website activities. Please see some websites that you can use to support the phonics taught in school:

https://www.phonicsplay.co.uk/

http://www.galacticphonics.com/

As we appreciate, many children love to read therefore each year group also has their own library of assorted books. Some of the books included within this library will be fully decodable for the children to read themselves, whereas other books will be for them to share and enjoy with an adult. The children can use this library daily.

Children will continue to receive a decodable phonic book until they have worked their way through all of the phonics units. After this, they will be able to choose from a selection of colour banded reader books alongside the year group library.