PHONICS 

At Griffin Park, we believe that reading is the key to success and underpins children's access to the curriculum; it clearly impacts on their achievement. To be able to read, children need to be taught an efficient strategy to decode words. That strategy is phonics. Phonic decoding skills must be practised until children become automatic and fluent reading is established. 

Little Wandle Letters and Sounds Revised is a complete systematic synthetic phonics programme (SSP) and it is the programme that we have adopted at Griffin Park

We prioritise the teaching of phonics; we teach phonics daily in Year R and Year 1. It is vitally important that children review and revisit Grapheme Phoneme Correspondences (GPCs) and words, daily, weekly and across terms and years, in order to move this knowledge into the children's long term memory. Our consistent approach to phonics ensures that children are given the best possible foundation for reading, writing and language skills. 

Children need to learn to read as quickly and reasonably as possible, so that they can move from learning to read, to reading to learn, giving them access to the treasure house of reading. Our expectations of progression are aspirational yet achievable; children who are not keeping up with their peers are given additional practise immediately through keep-up sessions.

Children enjoy a range of multi-sensory resources to support their phonics learning. On-going assessment of children's progress takes place and the books children read in school and take home to read are fully decodable and matched to children's secure phonics knowledge. As well as fully decodable books, children take home a non-decodable book for sharing that can be either read to or with them. These books play an essential role in developing a love of reading; an important distinction is that these books are being shared with the children, but they are using fully phonically decodable books to practise their independent reading.

Follow the link below to access the videos. 

At Griffin Park Primary School reading underpins everything that we do. Children are encouraged to read in all aspects of the curriculum and for their own pleasure. We encourage adults and children to share this love for reading. Parents play a vital role in this when supporting children's reading at home. Children's reading ages are assessed by teachers and shared with parents to stress the importance of reading at home and how they can support their children.  We also share ideas with parents about commenting in reading diaries and how they can extend their child's learning. Please take a look at the link below.  

All children will read individually with members of staff, guided reading in groups, shared reading as a whole class.  Children will also have the opportunity to selects books from our library and use iPads and other online resources to support reading.  Teachers read stories to all children every day to ignite their love of books.  

When working in groups children will read appropriately challenging texts from our reading schemes in school and also home readers.

Teachers in school run Reading Gladiators groups.  These are book clubs for children to attend to develop their love of reading.  Please see the section under News and Events for further details. 

Due to the demands of the new curriculum we are working on fluency of reading and also developing a deeper understanding of what we have read. The children will develop these skills in guided group sessions and also in specific comprehension skills sessions using new resources and training to support this.