At Cleeve Prior C of E Primary School we see reading as part of the foundation that education is built upon. we use the DFE validated phonics programme, produced by Twinkl Phonics, to teach phonics across the school. The programme is designed for daily use from the beginning of Reception, enabling children to make a smooth transition from Reception to Key Stage one.

The daily lesson plans cover all the main Grapheme-Phoneme Correspondances (GPCs) and Common Exception Words (CEWS) to provide children with the phonic knowledge and skills required for success in the Year one Phonics Screening Check and beyond.

Much evidence has been collated in recent years to demonstrate that teaching children to read words using Synthetic Phonics has a positive effect on children’s long-term ability to read and comprehend text.

Although it is true that many English words are not entirely phonically regular, the fact remains that around half of all words are completely decodable if the reader has the necessary toolkit of GPCs. This means that if we teach children to read words using a Synthetic Phonics approach, we are equipping them to read, at their first attempt, at least half of all words in the English language and to have a good chance of working out the tricky GPCs in most of the remaining words.

In a synthetic phonics programme like Twinkl Phonics, children are first taught the most common GPCs in the English language so that they can quickly begin to apply this knowledge to read whole words (blending), and soon after, to spell them (encoding). Over the course of the programme, they will be introduced to a number of alternative ways of representing the same phonemes, including some of the less common GPCs.

We have a clear programme and clear expectations about what sounds will taught and when they are taught in our mixed-age classes. Alongside this sits the Common Exception Words that your child will be taught. Your child’s phonic knowledge will be matched to your child’s reading book in order for them to continue to practise these skills when reading both at home and school. Your support at home is key to your child’s success.

We encourage the love of reading at Cleeve Prior Primary School. Children have an opportunity each day to read for pleasure. Our extensive libraries offer children the chance to read a wide range of fiction and non-fiction texts.