Reading and Phonics

Reading lies at the heart of the curriculum at Townley Primary School. We are dedicated to enabling our pupils to become lifelong readers and we believe reading is key to academic success.
 
PHONICS
 
To teach phonics, we use a Systematic Synthetic Phonics Programme (Storytime Phonics), which is taught daily from the start of Reception and in KS1. It uses real books to embed the new phonemes that children have learnt. To see examples of this online click on this link. This engaging and multi-sensory programme is rooted in the use of real books. It is also lots of fun - both for the pupils and teaching staff. 
 
Each of these phoneme/graphemes has a helpful "caption action" that goes alongside it to help embed the learning for your child. Ask them the actions for the sounds they have learned so far.  
 
The information from the recent workshop for parents held by Mrs Evans and Mrs Steer can be found here.
 
GUIDED READING
 
In KS1, guided reading is closely linked to writing using high-quality texts.
 
In KS2, our structured whole class reading is taught daily and focuses on the following reading skills: infer, predict, explain, retrieve, summarise/ sequence and vocabulary.
 
CLASS STORY
 
Every teacher reads aloud to their class each day, modelling good reading and thinking strategies and exposing the children to a variety of literature.
 
READING AT HOME
 
Each child has a reading record and a reading book linked to a coloured book band according to their reading level. They read it in class independently or to an adult (teacher or TA) and can take it home to share with parents or carers. Children also have a bookmark that gets ticked each time a book has been read. Once the bookmark is full you are part of the Hot Chocolate Club and you will get to have hot chocolate and biscuits with Mrs Higgins.