Reading at Swarcliffe Primary School
Our children love to read and are encouraged to read from the minute they arrive at Swarcliffe Primary School. We are extremely proud of the quality of texts we share with our children.
We use Read, Write, Inc and its extensive range of resources to teach our children the phonic knowledge and spelling patterns needed when blending and segmenting words. Fred the Frog helps us along our phonics journey, supporting us in reading our green words. As a school, we recognise the importance of early reading in order to promote a deep love of reading.
These skills are woven into our rich and broad curriculum. To develop comprehension and understanding of texts we use a range of schemes across school including: Rigby Star; Bug Club; Phonics Bug; RWI books; First News newspapers and our quality shared texts. We are very proud of the high quality texts we use and we ensure children are exposed to a variety of text types and authors to allow them to find their love of books.
Our Cannon of Classics provides children with timeless texts to experience again and again. Alongside these, children are challenged to read as many as possible from our '100 books in...' list.
Our Virtual Reading Library
Click the image below to view our virtual story-telling videos!
What does reading at Swarcliffe Primary look like?
Swarcliffe Reading Animals
These animals help us develop our comprehension skills.
Phonics and Reading in FS and KS1
Children are taught to read through the programme Read, Write, Inc. RWI, which focuses on letter sounds and formation, ensuring our children get off to a flying start in reading! Find out more information by clicking the clip...
Find more information using the link below as well as the information on this page.
Have a look at RWI Phonics in action ....
What is Read, Write, Inc?
In Read, Write, Inc, children learn phonemes (sounds) and the matching grapheme (letters that are written to represent that sound).
Sounds are divided into three sets:
- In Reception, children will learn Set 1 sounds and some Set 2.
- In Year One, children will secure Set 2 and learn Set 3 sounds.
- When children start Year Two, they will secure all the sounds and will then be able to read. This part of the phonics session is called ‘Speed Sounds’.
Fred Talk (Green Words)
As part of phonics sessions, children are introduced to Fred Frog once they are ready to start reading words. Fred can only say the sounds in a word and needs children to help him read the word (blend the sounds together). Fred can say the sounds and children will read the whole word. For example, Fred will say the sounds d-o-g and the children will say the word dog. This is called Fred Talk. Fred helps children throughout their phonics journey – he really enjoys sitting on children’s shoulders too! The words which Fred can help with are ‘green’ words – these are all phonetically decodable words.
Red Words
Fred can’t read ‘red’ words are these are sight words – they can’t be sounded out. For example, ‘me’, ‘what’ and ‘come’. Children must learn these words by sight and memory.
To support children these words are printed on to card using their different colours.
Nonsense Words
Nonsense words (also known as alien words) are made-up words using a mixture of the sounds children have learnt. Children need to understand when they are reading nonsense words so that they are not confused by trying to read the words for meaning.
Phonics Home Readers
In addition to home reading books children on the RWI scheme will receive a copy of the decodable text they have been reading in phonics lessons each Friday and this is due back to school the following Tuesday. Children who are not yet at ditty level will receive a blending book where they can practice reading words using their set 1 sounds. Children also have access to other RWI story books in school when they have one to one reading time with their teachers.
Some of our reading areas and displays ...
Set 1, 2 and 3 Sounds that are taught
Children read decodable books at the appropriate level
Fred helps the children to read using 'fred talk'
Click below to listen to some of our amazing reading!
