At Brays School we believe that all children can read and that language and reading are central to our curriculum. We are committed to promoting language development through supporting communication and reading across the curriculum. We believe in the importance of developing phonics skills as early readers, moving onto comprehension skills when students are ready.
As a school adopt two core aspects to teaching reading.
- Teaching text decoding (pre-phonics teaching, systematic synthetic phonics (SSP), vocabulary instruction)
- Teaching reading for a purpose (reading for pleasure, reading to learn);
Our Phonics and Reading Curriculum is a strand within the Communication, Language and Literacy faculty.
The school follows a thematic approach to learning, and we use rich vocabulary in the classroom to support all learning on the topics, and therefore improve vocabulary, fluency and excitement around reading.
Phonics
Listen & Learn Boxes
All of our pupils are taught to listen and engage with different sounds through fun and interactive activities.
Students learn to discriminate sounds and develop the precursor aspects required to move forward with our systematic synthetic phonics (SSP) programme.
The 7 precursor aspects that we teach are:
- General Sound Discrimination – Environmental Sounds
- General Sound Discrimination – Instrumental sounds
- General Sound Discrimination – Body Percussion
- Rhythm and Rhyme
- Alliteration
- Voice Sounds
- Aural Blending and Segmenting
Once the students are secure in all these areas, they are ready to move forward to our synthetic phonics scheme, Read, Write Inc.
Reading for Pleasure
It is important to Brays that we acknowledge the many different ways our students read for pleasure. We therefore provide a mix of texts such as fiction, non-fiction and audio, and aim to have these available in ‘book corners’ in each classroom as well as in our pop library, where the students can browse the different reading media available.
Reading and Phonics Pedagogy
We ensure regular training for all our teams to ensure understanding and clarity of our reading strategy and curriculum, and we collaborate with leaders across the Trust to ensure continuous development of our teaching and to share ideas and skills.