'Learn, Grow and Achieve Together Through God's Love'
We have set up a 'Home Learning' page under the 'Key Information' tab. This will provide more information for you about how to access a quality education for your children at home. Please remember to check your child's class page under the 'Children' tab for regular updates from your classteacher. Please collect a paper pack if you cannot access technology. If you would like more information please phone the DFE coronavirus helpline 0800 046 8687 or visit the full government guidance at:
https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/guidance-to-educational-settings-about-covid-19/guidance-to-educational-settings-about-covid-19Thank you for your tremendous support and understanding in this matter, if anything positive can come out of this then it is the wonderful community spirit and offers of help that have been overwhelming.
"I pray that your love will overflow more and more, and that you will keep on growing in knowledge and understanding."
Phillipians 1:9
Reading
We are passionate about the importance of reading at St. Stephen's C.E Church of England Primary School.
Over the seven years that your child is in our care we aim for them to develop a love of reading and books so that they move from learning to read to reading to learn – and reading purely for enjoyment too! We have a small library and from starting school the children are encouraged to take books home and share these with their family.
Children are heard read on a 1:1 basis and in guided reading groups. Regularly, children end the day with a story. In KS2 the children read regularly from a class novel linked to their topic.
Guided Reading takes place once a week. A group of children, all of a similar ability, work with the teacher on their next steps for learning in reading. Within their group, they all access the same text and work on either applying their phonic knowledge or developing their comprehension skills.
Each child will have a home reading book. Our reading scheme follows Letters and Sound phonics and ‘Book Band’ system in which a range of different books of the same level of difficulty are grouped under a colour (Lilac, Pink, Red, Yellow, Blue, Green, Orange, Purple, Gold, White, Lime, Brown, Grey, Dark Blue, Dark Pink.) The books vary in a number of ways, including layout, size, vocabulary and length, to give the children a rich diet of literature. The difference between each colour band/number stage is very gradual, so that children do not experience great difficulty moving up through the scheme. There are a wide range of books and genres in each colour band to keep children interested and motivated with their reading.
We use the following reading schemes in school : Oxford Reading Tree - Project X, Treetops, Pearson-Bug Club and Rocket Phonics.
We are excited to announce that we have joined Lancashire's "Year of Reading" in 2018. Here is the pledge that we have agreed to that shows that we definitely "Are Reading".
Phonics in the Early Years Foundation Stage and Key Stage 1
The school’s phonics programme is based on ‘Letters and Sounds’ (resources from the Department for Education and Skills). These resources provide a structured scheme to support teachers and teaching assistants in delivering high quality synthetic phonics across the Early Years Foundation Stage, Key Stage One and early Key Stage Two.
Letters and Sounds Phases 1-6:
Letters and Sounds is built around 6 phases, enabling children to progress at an individual level. Letters and Sounds should be taught daily for approximately fifteen minute pure phonics teaching time. Children entering school should begin working within Phase One.
Teachers and Teaching assistants should carry out regular assessments to ensure children are making progress and set challenging targets throughout the programme. Phases 1-6 are progressive and children should move through the phases at an appropriate pace.
Aspect 1: General sound discrimination- environmental sounds
Aspect 2: General sound discrimination- Instrumental sounds
Aspect 3: General sound discrimination- body percussion
Aspect 4: Rhythm and rhyme
Aspect 5: Alliteration
Aspect 6: Voice sounds
Aspect 7: Oral blending and segmenting
-Tuning into sounds (auditory discrimination)
-Listening and remembering sounds (auditory memory and sequencing)
-Talking about sounds (developing vocabulary and language comprehension)
Listen attentively
Enlarge their vocabulary
Speak confidently to adults and other children
Discriminate phonemes
Reproduce audibly the phonemes they hear, in order, all through the word.
Use sound-talk to segment words into phonemes.
Children entering school will have experienced a wealth of listening activities, including songs, stories and rhymes. They will be able to distinguish between speech sounds and many will be able to blend and segment words orally.
Every child entering Reception will progress to Phase 2.
The purpose of Phase Two is to:
Set 1: s a t p
Set 2: i n m d
Set 3: g o c k
Set 4: ck e u r
Set 5: h b f ff l ll ss
Phase Three
Children entering Phase Three will know around 19 letters and be able to blend phonemes to read VC and segment VC words to spell.
The purpose of Phase Three:
Set 6: j v w x
Set 7: y z zz qu
sh
ch
th
ng
etc
Phase Four
Children entering Phase Four will be able to represent each of 42 phonemes by a grapheme and be able to blend and read CVC words and segment for spelling.
The purpose of Phase Four:
Phase Five
Children entering Phase Five are able to read and spell words containing adjacent consonants and some polysyllabic words.
The purpose of Phase Five:
Phase Six
Children should know most of the common grapheme- phoneme correspondences. They should be able to read hundreds of words, doing this in three ways:
The School’s phonics programme aims to:
In the EYFS and Key Stage One:
Hearing the sound
Saying the sound
Making the sound through actions
Writing letters
Reading
Throughout Phases 1-3 the main focus of each lesson is to help pupils identify and count the number of sounds in each word and then write down these sounds in order. Phases 3-6 build on children’s knowledge and focus on graphemes.
Lessons also focus on letter formation and handwriting.
Skill Development
Sequencing
Pupils are given lots of practice in identifying first, last and middle sounds from a sequence of sounds before phonemes are introduced. For example, various combinations of claps, whistles, hoots. When sequencing skills have been acquired, pupils move onto identifying phonemes, reproducing them and encoding them as their commonest graphemes.
Segmenting
Pupils are given extensive practice in breaking words up into their phonemes. For example ‘cat’ is segmented c / a / t
Blending
Blending is running phonemes back together to form words.
Segmenting and blending are both essential skills in reading and writing text.
Glossary of terms
Decoding: Interpreting the symbols on paper which represent sounds- Reading!
Encoding: Using symbols as marks on paper to communicate what we want to say- Writing!
Phonemes: Basic sounds from which speech is composed For example, ‘sprout’ can be separated into five Phonemes- s/p/r/ou/t
There are about 44 phonemes in common use in speaking English
Graphemes: These are the written codes for the basic sounds. Graphemes can be one or more letters but they represent one phoneme, ‘ie’ can be represented by
Y (my)
i-e (time)
ie (pie)
igh (sigh)
Blending: Saying sounds smoothly together to hear a word- Reading.
Segmenting: Saying a word and hearing individual sounds- Spelling.
Tricky words: sets of high frequency words to build a child’s vocabulary