Dallam Community Primary School

Phonics are taught through the “Read Write Inc” structured programme of teaching. To begin with the children are taught in 15-20 minute sessions each day, through games, actions and use of flashcards and magnetic letters, learning how to say the sound (phoneme) for each letter (grapheme) and eventually move on to groups of letters like sh, ch, igh (digraphs and trigraphs). They learn to hear and say the sounds in words like c-a-t by pulling them apart (segmenting) and putting them back together (blending). They will sometimes bring some phonics homework home where they can practice writing the sound they have been learning. These vital skills help them to read words that are phonetically spelt but some words, that cannot be easily decoded, are learnt as ‘tricky words’ such as ‘come’ and ‘the’. These skills are then applied to learning to spell and to write sentences.

For more informtion visit:

https://www.ruthmiskin.com/parents/

You will be asked to fill in the yellow Reading Record book each time you hear your child read at home or you share their sharing book. For every 10 occasions your child reads at home, and this is recorded in their reading champion’s book, they will receive a certificate and a special mention in the school newsletter.

Please be honest with your comments, if your child had problems with certain words or found the book very difficult, please say so. Perhaps they have mastered the vocabulary but still cannot tell you what the story is about.  Do not be afraid to leave a message to ask us to send home the same book again; this is not a race and moving on too quickly may result in difficulties at a later stage. In the very early stages, it is fine to simply tell your child an unknown word and explain what it means. Do not let your child struggle with trying to sound out words that are not phonetically decodable, for example ‘tricky words’ such as ‘come’ and ‘who’ which cannot be sounded out as c-o-m-e and w-h-o.