Phonics
At Clayton Brook School, we recognise that reading is a fundamental skill needed to ensure our pupils achieve successfully throughout their lives. Learning to read is one of the most important things children will learn at our school. Access to almost every other area of the curriculum depends heavily on it, and as a school we strive to ensure that every single child learns to read as quickly as possible.
We use the Lancashire 'Red Rose Letters and Sounds' as a systematic scheme. It is taught daily in discrete 25-minute sessions and phonics knowledge and skills are reinforced and applied across the curriculum through a multi-sensory approach. We also provide interventions where necessary.
What is Phonics?
Phonics is a way of teaching children to read quickly and skillfully.
They are taught how to:
- Recognise the sounds that individual letters make.
- Identify the sounds that different combinations of letters make-such as 'sh' or 'oo.’
- Blend these sounds together from left to right to make a word.
Children can then use this knowledge to 'decode' new words that they hear or see. This is the first important step in learning to read.
The children are taught to read words by blending, which means pushing all the sounds together to make a word. The children are taught to spell words by segmenting, which means sounding out words and writing down the sounds they can hear.