Early Reading and Phonics

In our phonics lessons at Crooksbarn Primary School, children learn vital skills to prepare them for fluency in and enjoyment of reading throughout their education and beyond. We allow all children to experience success in their early reading through high-quality teaching and timely, targeted support.

Children are given a range of opportunities to apply their understanding of GPCs in their reading and writing, offering a strong foundation for all learning as they progress through school. All children demonstrate excellent understanding of the terminology used in phonics and can successfully apply feedback related to their phonetic understanding to correct spellings and read texts of increasing difficulty.

Those who fail to achieve a passing score in the Phonics Screening Check in Year 1 are targeted with consistent, personalised interventions to support them as they transition and progress through Year 2 and Key Stage 2. Staff across all key stages work closely to provide a seamless progression of phonics inputs, matched to individual children’s ability.

We aim for phonics to provide children with the earliest understanding of a range of wonderful stories so that we can support them in embedding an early love of reading. Phonetically decodable books allow children to independently explore characters and plots that interest them, in preparation for accessing more complicated texts as they move through school.

As stated in The Reading Framework (2021), we must find the balance between consistent implementation of a systematic, synthetic phonics programme and harnessing an early love of stories and reading. We believe that our teaching at Crooksbarn supports this and sets all of our children up for great success in reading and beyond.

Little Wandle – Grow the Code
Little Wandle Progression
Little Wandle KS2 – Complete the Code
Phonics and Early Reading 
Programme Overview – Reception
Programme Overview – Year 1