Early Reading

Year One & Year Two

Children follow the same format as Reception, but will work on complex sounds and read books appropriate to their reading level. Daily sessions of RWI phonics last for 40 mins (20 minutes speed sounds and 20 minutes for Reading).  Once children become fluent speedy readers they will move on to Guided Reading comprehension activities within Year 1 and Year 2.

Five key principles underpin the teaching in all Read Write Inc. sessions:  

Purpose – know the purpose of every activity and share it with the children, so they know the one thing they should be thinking about

Participation – ensure every child participates throughout the lesson. Partnership work is fundamental to learning

Praise – ensure children are praised for effort and learning, not ability

Pace – teach at an effective pace and devote every moment to teaching and learning

Passion – be passionate about teaching so children can be engaged emotionally.

Fred Talk

We use pure sounds (‘m’ not’ muh’,’s’ not ‘suh’, etc.) so that your child will be able to blend the sounds into words more easily.

At school we use a frog called Fred who is an expert on sounding out words! we call it, ‘Fred Talk’. E.g. m-o-p, c-a-t, m-a-n, sh-o-p, b-l-a-ck.

 The following video is an example of blending sounds with Fred. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dEzfpod5w_Q

The children are taught the sounds in 3 sets.

 Set 1 Sounds are taught in the following order together with rhymes to help children form the letters correctly and instantly recognise sounds ready for blending.

As well as learning to read and blend real words children will have plenty of opportunities to apply their sound recognition skills on reading ‘Nonsense words’. These words will also feature heavily in the Year One Phonics Screening check in the summer term. 

Applying Phonics

Children will be introduced to ‘Ditty books’ when they successfully begin to read single words.

 Children use sound-blending (Fred Talk) to read short ditties. They will bring these home once they have read and discussed the book in class. Children will then be challenged to use their developing phonic knowledge to write short sentences.

 Within all the books children will have red and green words to learn, to help them to become speedy readers. Red words are words that are not easily decodable and challenge words to extend children’s vocabulary. Green words are linked to the sounds they have been learning and are easily decodable.

 Once your child has been introduced and taught these words in school we will send these home for you to continue practising with your child.

During the RWI session children will read a selected book three times and at each new reading they will have plenty of opportunities to practise using their developing comprehension skills. You will hear your child talking about ‘hold, edit or build a sentence’.

 Hold a sentence is an activity that encourages children to remember a whole sentence while focusing on spelling and punctuation.

 Build a sentence is to give children the opportunity to create their own sentence to that shows the meaning of a word and edit a sentence allows the children to critique a sentence using their knowledge of spelling punctuation and grammar. Children complete a longer piece of independent writing, which gives them the opportunity to show off their creativity and to practice their spelling, grammar and punctuation.

Using phonics to record spoken words

 Children will use ‘Fred fingers’ to first sound out a word before they write it down. This method allows children to confidentially identify the spoken sounds within words an enable them to record those sounds to form legible words to eventually build sentences. This method links to the “Fred Talk” applied within their daily phonics sessions.