What are children learning?

Prioritise Reading

At St Wilfrid’s, we recognise that reading is a fundamental life skill that opens the door to learning across the wider curriculum. We are committed to nurturing a lifelong love of reading and ensuring that every pupil develops the confidence and skills needed to become a successful reader. We understand that strong reading provision is central to the ongoing improvement of the school, and therefore maintain a clear and consistent focus on reading from the very beginning of each child’s education.

Early reading is a key priority, and we are determined that every child will learn to read successfully, irrespective of their background, individual needs or starting point. Through high-quality teaching, targeted support and appropriate challenge, all pupils, including those who find reading more difficult, are supported to make strong progress towards, and where possible beyond, age-related expectations.

Across the wider curriculum, children are provided with regular opportunities to practise, apply and develop their reading skills. This enables pupils to transfer their reading knowledge and strategies into different subjects, broadening their vocabulary, understanding and confidence as readers.

Foster a ‘Love of reading’

At St Wilfrid’s, all staff are committed to fostering a lifelong love of reading and supporting every child to become an enthusiastic and confident reader. Teachers have a strong knowledge of children’s literature and actively encourage pupils to discuss, reflect upon and share their thoughts about the books and texts they have experienced.

Teachers model reading aloud with enthusiasm and expression, introducing children to new ideas, concepts and vocabulary that capture their interest, stimulate their imagination and support their language and cognitive development. Stories, poems and other texts are shared with children every day, helping to strengthen their listening and language skills while developing their understanding of the written word. We also recognise the important role that families play in developing a love of reading and encourage parents and carers to experience shared reading with their children through opportunities to join class reading sessions.

Our learning environments are designed to promote and celebrate reading, with every classroom providing an inviting and well-used reading area. These spaces offer a wide and varied selection of high-quality books that are accessible to children and carefully looked after. Collections include fiction and non-fiction, as well as poetry, rhymes and other engaging texts, supporting the development of vocabulary, language comprehension and a positive attitude towards reading. In the Foundation Stage and Key Stage 1, classroom displays also include graphemes to reinforce and support the teaching of phonics.

Children are given regular time to explore books independently and, importantly, to talk about the texts they enjoy. Teachers and other members of staff model how to respond to and discuss books, encouraging pupils to think about their reading, express their preferences and share their opinions. Through these conversations and experiences, children develop not only their reading skills but also their confidence, curiosity and enjoyment of books.

How are children learning, and how do we assess the progress children make?

Programme and Progress

At St Wilfrid’s we use ‘The Bug Club Phonics’ teaching programme which is DfE approved. The programme aims to develop confident and motivated readers and captures children’s imagination to nurture lifelong readers.

The programme is fast-paced and backed up by daily revision of past teaching. Each lesson consists of effective, high-quality lessons.  

The school has clear expectations of pupils’ phonics term-by–term, from Nursery to Year 2. (Please see Phonics Long term)

Books match sounds

We support the children's application of phonics by matching their school and home reading books to the sounds that they have previously learnt in class to increase reading fluency. The children use Bug Club Phonics readers, which fully support the daily phonics lesson. The books have been written to match the order in which grapheme−phoneme correspondences are introduced in Bug Club Phonics. The books begin in Phase 2 and continue through to Phase 5.

Each unit of Bug Club Phonics links with a series of decodable texts. These are designed to give children the opportunity to practise their blending skills and to consolidate their knowledge of grapheme−phoneme correspondences, in the context of engaging texts, in addition to the sentence level work in the Language Sessions.

Teachers show parents how they can practise reading sounds and words and listen to their children read decodable books during ‘Phonics Information meetings’ and ‘Watch Me Read’ sessions’.

Children who are just beginning to learn the letter/sound correspondences are learning at the same time to tell stories using books which do not have words to begin with. This is crucial in the development of spoken language and vocabulary, and it is a necessary stepping stone towards becoming an accomplished reader and writer.

Phonics from the start

The teaching of synthetic phonics begins in Nursery, where children learn to discriminate between sounds in the environment through the use of rhyme, rhythm and alliteration. The foundation stage is a ‘language-rich’ environment that focusses on developing children's speaking and listening skills to lay the foundations of phonics. The emphasis is to get children attuned to the sounds around them and ready to begin developing oral blending and segmenting skills.

Children are then taught the 26 graphemes and practice recognising phonemes in words. They have opportunities to apply their developing phonic knowledge and skills in the context of shared reading and writing. We use a range of exciting rhymes, songs, practical activities and outdoor learning to embed reading in a range of contexts, demonstrating to children the impact of reading in every aspect of life.

Discrete, daily phonics teaching continues into KS1. The children continue to learn new graphemes for the phonemes they already know, as well as alternative pronunciations for the graphemes. They are also taught the Common Exception Words for Year 1 and 2 as set out in the National Curriculum (2014).  The teaching of reading in Year 2 and above continues to improve reading accuracy and fluency, as well as further developing pupils’ interest and pleasure as they learn to read independently with confidence.

Catch up quickly

Teachers are responsible for assessing the progress of all pupils in their class. An ongoing assessment of pupils’ phonics progress is used from the start of nursery and is sufficiently frequent and detailed to identify any pupil who is falling behind the programme’s pace.