Phonics

At Briercliffe Primary School, phonics is a way of teaching children to read quickly and skilfully. 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. Our children do well in the Year 1 Phonics Screening Check and by Year 2, the majority are fluent readers. 

Children are given accurately matched, fully decodable home reading books that allow them to apply their phonic knowledge and practice reading at home with their parents. The books contain only the phonemes which the children have already been taught so far, and leave nothing for the children to 'guess' when reading (which can often lead to errors).  The exception to this is for children receiving intervention who are not currently working at age-related expectations. They will take home readers home that match the learning covered in intervention sessions. We believe it is important for children to experience success when reading these books, and they must be celebrated for reading them fluently at home, allow them to show off their reading ability and share the joy of reading together! For queries relating to reading at Briercliffe, please contact our Phonics Lead, Miss Slater.

Reading for Pleasure

At Briercliffe, we are ambitious for our children to have the best possible life chances open to them. We recognise reading as a crucial life skill that opens up endless opportunities for our children to succeed. We want to ensure that all our children are equipped to read easily, fluently and with good understanding and to develop the habit of reading widely and often, for both pleasure and information. We strive to promote a love of reading across our curriculum, offering a wide range of texts for our children to access. 

Every child in school, in addition to their home reading book matched to ability, gets to choose their own book for pleasure.