Vision

At Peel Park Primary School, we believe reading and writing are fundamental skills that are utilised daily throughout our whole lives. Therefore, we aim to provide high quality phonics lessons which not only result in the children becoming fluent readers, but also ignites a lifelong love of reading, regardless of background or ability.

Intent

We strive to ensure that all children become successful, fluent readers by the end of KS1, and we aim for all children to leave KS2 with a genuine passion for reading, equipped with the skills needed to tackle any book of their choice. We believe this is achievable through high-quality, narrative-rich phonics and whole class reading sessions, set within a ‘reading for pleasure’ culture.

Implementation

Everyone teaching early phonics skills at Peel Park has fidelity to the Phonics Shed programme, which is a DfE accredited scheme. Our children love this consistent, systematic approach and look forward to daily phonics lessons, plus it promotes familiarity so that children retain learning and working memory is not overloaded. We embrace the strategies taught in Phonics Shed in all areas of our EYFS and KS1 curriculum.

Phonics Shed is an engaging character based, narrative scheme which provides a systematic, multi-sensory way to teach reading through synthetic phonics. The scheme enables children to become fluent readers and writers by providing strategies such as, ‘Say It, Stretch It, Sound It,’ to decode words by teaching links between letters (graphemes) and the sounds (phonemes) they can make.

The children will quickly become familiar with Joe, who is their guide in the Phonics Shed Garden. Joe will introduce them to different characters, each representing a new grapheme-phoneme correspondence. Then, learning is reinforced by offline and online multi-sensory tasks and games, as well as with fully decodable books.

Impact

Children at our school develop fluency (automaticity, prosody and accuracy) and a love of reading. They have confidence to attempt to spell words for themselves, choosing the correct graphemes, using their ‘Best Fit Rule’ knowledge. In addition to this, children gain the skills which ensure that they can recognise, read and spell high frequency words that do not conform to regular phonic patterns (common exception words).

For further information about the teaching of Phonics Shed and for advice on how you can support your child at home, please see the links below.