Phonics and Early Reading at Sacred Heart 

At Sacred Heart we aim for all our children to become fluent, confident readers who are passionate about reading. 

Children who read regularly or are read to regularly, have the opportunity to open the doors to so many different worlds! 

More importantly, reading will give our children the tools to become independent life-long learners. 

We can achieve this together through: 

* Read Write Inc, a systematic synthetic phonics programme to help your child to read

* Encouraging children to develop a love of books by reading to them daily, at home and at school

* Giving children access to a wide range of books at school and at home. 

Read, Write Inc. 

In Nursery, children join in a wide range of fun daily activities that focus on developing the children's speaking and listening skills through: 

environmental sounds

instrumental sounds

body percussion

rhythm and rhyme

alliteration

voice sounds

oral blending and segmenting sounds 

All of these daily activities lay the essential foundations for children to move on to develop their phonic skills. 

At Sacred Heart we follow the approved systematic synthetic phonics programme Read, Write Inc. RWInc lessons are taught on a daily basis. During the sessions, children learn to recognise and read letter sounds and how to blend the sounds together to say and read words. In addition to the daily RWInc session, children in Class 1 and Class 2 have an extra Speedy Phonics Lesson where the whole class joins in a 10 minute phonics session. 

Five key principles underpin the teaching in all Read Write Inc sessions: 

Purpose - know the purpose of every activity and share it with the children, so they know the one thing they should be thinking about.

Participation - ensure every child participates throughout the lesson. Partnership work is fundamental to learning. 

Praise - ensure children are praised for effort and learning, not ability. 

Pace - teach at an effective pace and devote every moment to teaching and learning

Passion - be passionate about teaching so children can be engaged emotionally. 

Fred Talk

Children learn pure sounds ('m' not 'muh) so that they can blend the sounds into words more easily. Fred the Frog is an expert at sounding out words and he joins our daily RWInc sessions to help the children to Fred Talk the words. Fred Talk is also known as oral blending and it takes a lot of practice. 

Click the link below to watch a video to find out more about pure sounds and learning to blend sounds. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dEzfpod5w_Q