English and Phonics

At Sywell CE Primary School, we recognise that English skills underpin all elements of the curriculum and are essential life-skills. Considering the fundamental importance of speaking, listening, reading and writing in everyday life, we are dedicated to enabling our children to become successful and accomplished in these key elements.

Phonics

We use the Read, Write, Inc. systematic synthetic phonics programme at our school. This scheme focuses on enabling children to decode the representation of letters (graphemes) into a sound (phoneme), and how to blend sounds together to make words and meaning. Further information can be found here:

Ruth Miskin Training

Please also see the attached document at the bottom of this page for further information about how we teach phonics to your child as well as information on how best to support at home. Throughout the year, we will host parent workshops and send out information about this too, so please look out for these.

How to say the sounds:

Reading

At Sywell Church of England Primary School, we are committed to instilling a love of reading in each and every one of our children which they carry with them through their time at our school, as well as into their future lives. Through the combination of teaching the required skills to read within a familiar and positive reading environment, we believe it will establish lifelong, confident readers. We encourage all of our children to be resilient in their journey of becoming a reader and understand all of the skills involved in this progressive process. We are committed to exposing children to a range of authors and text types which they can enjoy and learn more about the world from as they progress through the school.

Reading underpins the curriculum at Sywell CE Primary School and opportunities to utilise texts and reading strategies are applied across all subjects. Teachers carefully plan sequences of lessons that are based on quality texts to enable pupils to develop skills and strategies such as to predict, ask questions, skim, scan, use prior knowledge and make connections.

Reading at Home

The school expectation is that children should be reading 3-5 times a week at home. Please sign your child(ren)’s Reading Record to show when they have read at home with you and make any comments about how they got on.

We also have a ‘Reading Spine’ at Sywell, please see the attached document at the bottom of this page for more information about what this is and what texts feature on it!

Writing

As a school, we follow the Trust's approach to writing. This approach utilises high quality texts which are used for both the reading and writing aspects of a lesson. Children are taught grammatical skills explicitly before being taught to apply the skill in a genre specific context. Children are taught to develop their stamina for writing as well as developing their skills to write cohesively.

Spelling

Spellings are taught weekly in Years 1 – 6, in Key Stage 1 this is delivered through phonics teaching. In Year 2 and Key Stage 2, teachers use the RWI Get Spelling! programme to deliver sequential sessions which practise and embed skills important for learning spelling rules and patterns. Children are given spellings to learn each week at home.

Sywell CofE Primary School