Early Reading and Phonics

At St Oswald's we aim for all our children to enter Key Stage 2 as confident and fluent readers. We aim to foster a love of reading in all our pupils and for them to read for pleasure well beyond Key Stage 2. 

In our Early Years Foundation Stage, children at St Oswald's are taught the sounds made by individual letters, digraphs (where two letters make one sound such as ‘ch’) and trigraphs (where three letters make one sound such as ‘igh’). They learn to segment words into their sounds such as c-oa-t and to blend them back together again to enable them to decode words they have sounded out. Phonics provides the building blocks for our early readers and writers. 

In addition to this, our children learn to instantly recognise by sight the 100 high frequency words or tricky words. Some of these words are decodable such as ‘and’ whereas others are what we term ‘tricky’ (i.e. they are not decodable using phonic knowledge such as ‘one’). Learning these high frequency words enables the children to access texts and reduce the working memory load when approaching an unknown text.

In Key Stage 1, we continue to develop the children’s phonics knowledge by introducing further digraphs and trigraphs including alterative pronunciations for sounds already encountered.  We integrate our phonics learning with our teaching of writing. By the time children move to Key Stage 2 (KS2), we want our children to be confident to read and write independently. 

Click the links below to see our EYFS curriculum.

Autumn 1        Autumn 2        Spring 1       Spring 2      Summer 1      Summer 2

Autumn - EYFS

Spring - EYFS

ZoG Julia Donaldson	Selected Poems Julia Donaldson	Oliver's Vegetables Vivian French	Jack and the Beanstalk Various authors
Pirates Julia Donaldson	Smeds and Smoods Julia Donaldson	Tad : A big story about a brave minibeast Benji Davies

Summer - EYFS

Phonics

At St Oswald's we follow the Red Rose letters and sounds framework alongside a range of resources to engage and develop phonics knowledge and early reading skills in our youngest children. 

Pronunciation of pure sounds

Links

Oxford Owl - Class logins available on the home learning hub

The Children's library

The Book Trust

Sooper Books