At Park School Federation, we recognise the importance of literacy and making sure every child is a reader, as this opens the door to everything else.  We recognise the importance of having a solid foundation in phonics and ensuring there is a consistent scheme across the Federation to enable the children to make connections in their learning.

The ‘Read Write Inc’ scheme begins in Early Years and on into Year 1 and 2 for as long as the children require phonics teaching. The children then move onto literacy lessons from Spring term in Year 2 and upwards through the Federation. This is supported by the Literacy Tree scheme, which offers a wide variety of rich and interesting texts in a complete book-based approach to Literacy. This beautifully complements our approach to reading as well, which is based around Whole Class Reading. The school has chosen a range of texts to base the development of their reading and inference skills. We have worked with the Local Authority to develop the use of inference strategies throughout our lessons, and then into the rest of the curriculum. This helps them to make connections between all their learning. For children still requiring phonics in the Junior school, this continues with the Read Write Inc scheme and then moving onto Fresh Start as they enter Year 5 and 6. This is additional to their work in Literacy.

Our spelling work is at first linked to the Read Write Inc Scheme, before going into the Literacy Tree work, where they have Spelling Seed lessons to support the development of their spelling knowledge. Alongside this, we also have access to Spelling Shed, a website which helps children to practise their spellings each week, either at home or at school.

For handwriting, the children learn how to form their letters in conjunction with their work in phonics on the initial sounds. This is also supported throughout the Federation with the Letter Join scheme and handwriting font. We have found this approach very successful, in particular, with preparing children to join their letters. The first year of using this scheme helped to transform the way we taught handwriting and the children made rapid progress in their cursive skills.

Read Write Inc – Our Systematic Synthetic Phonics Scheme

At Park, we chose Read Write Inc as our choice for a systematic synthetic phonics teaching programme, approved by the DfE.

We chose this scheme as we have already used it for many years in school and with the latest updates we find that it provides a systematic and consistent approach to the teaching of reading, in a way that our children love!

The link below provides a more detailed guide to the scheme, how it is taught, along with lots of other resources and videos to help you support your child at home too and become familiar with all the key vocabulary and different ways that we will support your child to develop their phonics and learn to have a life-long love of reading.

Parent Guide to Read Write Inc