At Petworth CofE Primary School we are proud of our readers. Encouraging children to develop a love of reading from an early age is a goal that guides our practice across the school.
In accordance with the recent government guidance in the Reading Framework (2021), our Early Years and KS1 children use Phonics Shed resources to develop their knowledge of phonics to lay the foundations for children to become fluent at decoding age-appropriate texts. Phonics Shed is a complete systematic synthetic phonics programme with coverage from sound awareness in pre-school, into a full phonics scheme of learning that leads into Spelling Shed’s complementary spelling system and is also compatible with 2007 Letters and Sounds.
Once sufficiently confident, children begin to read phonically decodable texts. We have a wide selection of reading books; including Phonics Shed, Big Cat, Project X, Dandelion readers and Oxford Reading Tree. This is to ensure that there is a variety for the children to choose from and that they can have opportunities to begin to make book choices based on their interests. Reading books are sent home regularly and these are closely matched to the ability of each child, as well as including letter sounds and high frequency words that have been taught in school.
When children have consolidated the ability to decode and understand texts from our reading schemes, they begin to make their own choices about the texts they wish to read (with the guidance of their class teacher). In addition to the reading schemes mentioned, we offer children the opportunity to explore a broad range of texts from our school library to further enrich their literary diet.