" The most important starting point is to read to children. Reading to children is the best way of encouraging them to love books and reading. By reading stories aloud to children everyday, you are forming a link for them between reading, comfort and love. When you love a book, your children will want to hear it again and again! Children thrive on repetition, so when you've read Room on the Broom for the hundredth time, remember you are hardwiring their brains for success." Ruth Miskin 2020.

At Briercliffe Primary School, we follow the systematic synthetic phonics programme ' Red Rose Letters and Sounds'. Phonics is taught on a daily basis throughout the EYFS and KS1 and targeted interventions are delivered in KS2 using the IDL and Lexia reading programmes. 

We are committed to every child learning to read as quickly as possible with the strongest start to reading in the Foundation Stage. We follow the 'Letters and Sounds' programme daily and love to see how our rigorous phonics teaching transforms our youngest children into confident and happy readers. We use our daily phonics sessions and weekly guided reading sessions to teach our children how to read, write and spell. Our children do well in the Year 1 Phonics Screening Check and by Year 2, the majority are fluent readers with the best chance of success in the end of Key Stage 1 tests. 

Our phonic sessions take place every morning for all Reception, Year 1 and Year 2 children with no exceptions, as the pace and consistency is a key element to developing reading skills for all children. This is integral to allowing our children to effectively learn the rest of the school curriculum using their knowledge and skill in reading. Children also learn to read and spell words that do not conform to regular phonetic patterns (High Frequency Words) and during phonics and guided reading sessions decode both fiction and non-fiction texts through discussion, performance and adult led activities.

Following a short series of phonics sessions, children are then given accurately matched, fully decodable reading books that allow the children to apply their phonic knowledge and practice reading at home with their parents. This means that the books contain only the sounds in which the children have already been taught so far, and leaves nothing for the children to 'guess' when reading (which can often lead to errors). It is therefore important for the children to experience success when reading these books and they must be celebrated for reading these fluently at home. Allow them to show off their reading ability to you and share the joy of reading together!

Below you will find some useful websites and documents to help with reading at home. 

Please click on the link below for a parent and carers guide to pronouncing phonemes.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TTe5_Em0BHQ 

Next Parent Reading Workshop -

EYFS / KS1 Focus - Wednesday 17th November at 6.30pm 

"Imagine a primary school where, over seven or eight years, children are read to, enjoy, discuss and work with a core of around 80 books. These ‘essential reads’ would be a store of classics, creating a living library inside a child’s mind. This is the ‘reading spine’. Schools that have a reading spine build a common bank of stories that bind the community together.” Pie Corbett, Literacy expert

With this in mind, here at Briercliffe Primary School, we have created our own bespoke Reading Spine. A variety of texts that our children enjoy, and a number of texts that our staff feel will inspire, motivate and create a love of reading. The reading spine has been divided into recommended texts intended for each year group, with the hope that when our children leave us at the end of their Briercliffe journey, we will have created a living library inside their minds and a bank of stories that will stay with them for many years to come.