Welcome to
Alwyn Infant School
"Really good school and friendly environment."
Year 2 Parent
Reading
Phonics - the journey to early reading
We use the Floppy's Phonics programme across the school. It is a systematic, synthetic phonics programme that supports the teaching of reading, spelling and handwriting. The alphabetic code is taught systematically and incidentally and, with a 'little and often' approach, that allows children to succeed.
The alphabetic code links letters to the smallest sounds of speech. This code is reversible and taught in a systematic way with lots of revision and practice. The core skills of the programme are:
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Sounding out and blending for reading (decoding)
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Identifying sounds in words (segmenting) and which letters are used to represent them (encoding)
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Handwriting - the forming of letters while saying the sounds
The children are taught to decode for reading, which means they translate the letter symbols into sounds when reading. For spellings, they must learn to encode where they start with the sounds and must turn them into the printed word.
The videos below show the cards we use in school to teach and revise the sounds. You can see the letter, the associated picture prompt and hear the sounds that are taught.
Reading Books
At Alwyn Infant School the children have access to a wide range of fiction and non-fiction texts. Our main reading scheme is Oxford Reading Tree. The Floppy's Phonics books link directly to our teaching scheme. These books are fully decodable to allow children to practise the sounds they know to blend words and become confident readers.
We also have 'Share with Me' books that can be read with an adult and are designed to build vocabulary. The children have the opportunity to read in class and take these books home but they will have sounds that the children may not have been taught yet.
The support our parents give with reading is greatly valued and we know they enjoy reading to their child as well as hearing their child make large gains in their reading progress.
You can also visit the Oxford Owl website where you can read many e-books linked to our school phonics scheme for free. The e-books can be shared at home and read independently or there is also an audio option to read along with them. This provides an exciting new opportunity to make reading more accessible and fun. The children will each have their own login to access new areas to help their learning.
The Pleasure of Reading
A fantastic way of supporting your child is by reading a vast range of different types of books. Books inspire and stimulate a child's imagination and can also help with their understanding of punctuation and word types.
Spend time enjoying stories and facts but also recap on their reading. Can they retell or summarise the story plot or facts? What might happen next? Why has the character behaved in a specific way? Can they find clues in the text and the picture? Perhaps talk about any new words- what do they mean? Can they put them in a sentence?
All year groups will be looking at a few fairy tales. It would be lovely if the children could read more of these at home so they become familiar with the repeating patterns and phrases.
A few suggestions would be:
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Cinderella
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Rapunzel
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Sleeping Beauty
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The Frog Prince
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The Princess and the Pea
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Goldilocks and the Three Bears
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Little Red Riding Hood
A visit to the local library or just a browse around a book shop may appeal to the most reluctant reader and don't forget the power of picture books and comics!
If your child wanted, they could write a book review or draw their favourite part of a book and bring it into school to share with their class mates. Or be creative and take part in our half term challenges. In February, children were asked to create a collage, picture or scene from their favourite book. We had some amazing work produced that is now displayed in school.
To support reading and writing, and other areas of the curriculum, we have a purple mash subscription. Again, this is web based and will be used in the classroom however it can also be accessed at home for the children to have a go at different projects, carry out research and share some of their work that has been completed in class. The children have their login details and it can be accessed via the link.
