In school, we make a lot of use of real texts as well as reading books and we use stories as a starting point or stimulus for lots of learning. We encourage children to engage with texts and to talk about them, answering questions, retelling and making links with their own learning and experiences.

Our children start to learn to read and write by building their knowledge of the initial sounds and of the sounds and patterns in words. In Nursery this is all done through play and by following children’s interests. Children have access to all sorts of resources to support their early mark making (which later becomes writing) and to explore sounds through stories, songs and rhymes. They are encouraged to make marks and write in real contexts.

Into P1, we start to teach reading and writing of sounds more formally. As your child learns these sounds, we also teach them to blend them to make words. We start with three letter words which we call CVC words as they are spell consonant-vowel-consonant. Once your child is confident with the initial sounds and CVC words, they will go on to blending longer words and to learn diagraphs which are sounds made up of two letters e.g ch, ng, oa. Click here to learn more about blending.

Not all words can be spelt phonetically e.g. said is not spelt ‘sed’. We call these tricky words and we support children to use word banks to write these correct as they can’t use their blending skills to work them out.

Phonics supports reading and writing. Children will use their knowledge of sounds and blending to tackle words they want to read as well as to sound out words they want to write. We encourage them to say it slowly and write what they hear. In the Early stages we don’t correct spelling as we want to encourage confidence and flow.  If a young child writes ‘ I sore a bawl and sed to Mum I wantid it.’ we would accept that as it is phonetically correct but as the child gets older we would start to gently correct e.g. by asking them to check the spelling of ‘said’ on a tricky word card.

During P3 or into P4 (all children are different and will progress at the pace that is right for them) most children begin to start working on spelling as opposed to phonics. By this stage your child will know all the basic sounds and they are ready to learning spelling rules.

As children move up through the school, we increasingly expect them to spell all words correctly rather than phonetically. To do this, they need to learn patterns and rules, homophones (words which sound the same but are spelt differently and have different meanings) and to use a dictionary and thesaurus. It is also important to be able to edit work and we make time for the children to go back over their work to looks for errors to self correct and well as giving them support to find errors they might not notice on their own. This might be support from an adult or from a peer. We use success criteria and writing expectation sheets so that children know what we are looking for in their written work.

We make good use of the SpellingFrame Resource in school and for home learning. Please Click Here to access a parents’ guide to SpellingFrame.