English
Read, Write Inc - Information for Parents/Carers,
Learning to read is the most important thing your child will learn at our school. Everything else depends on it, so we put as much energy as we possibly can into making sure that every single child learns to read as quickly as possible. We want your child to love reading – and to want to read for themselves. This is why we put our efforts into making sure they develop a love of books as well as simply learning to read.
What is Read Write Inc?
At Lady Elizabeth Hastings we believe that reading is the most important skill that children learn at school. Reading is the key to future success.
Read Write Inc. (RWI) teaches synthetic phonics in a structured and exciting way. Children will start the scheme during the first tern in Ledston Class and will work through the scheme until they can read confidently, fluently and with good comprehensive understanding.
What is synthetic phonics?
When your child is learning to read there are two crucial aspects to learn:
– the sounds represented by written letters
– how to blend the sounds together to make words.
Synthetic Phonics is a way of teaching reading.
Children are taught to read letters or groups of letters by saying the sound(s) they represent; for example, they are taught that the letter 'l' sounds like llllll when we say it. Children can then start to read words by blending the sounds together to make a word. There are 26 letters of the alphabet but they make 44 sounds. Please take some time to watch the following video to ensure you have the correct pronunciation of each sound.
Who is Fred?
Fred is a (toy) frog and Fred can’t read! He can only say words in pure sounds. We use ‘Fred talk’ to help blend the sounds together in words to help Fred to read. We then move onto ‘Fred in your head’ to increase our fluency.
The children can’t use the skill of ‘Fred Talk’ or ‘Fred in your head’ for all words, as some do not follow the phonics rule. For example, ‘the’ ‘are’ and ‘some’. Therefore, these are taught as Red words within Read, Write, Inc. We teach them as sight words and the more children are exposed to them, the more they are instilled in their long term memory.
The following video is an example of blending sounds with Fred. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dEzfpod5w_Q
How will RWI be taught?
All children are assessed regularly by our RWI lead. From these assessments, children are grouped into stages where they work alongside their peers on the same stage.
How will my child be taught to read?
We start by teaching phonics to the children in Ledston class. This means that they learn how to ‘read’ the sounds in words and how those sounds can be written down. This is essential for reading, but it also helps children learn to spell well. We teach the children simple ways of remembering these sounds and letters. Ask them to show you what these are.
The children also practise reading (and spelling) what we call ‘tricky words’, such as ‘once,’ ‘have,’ ‘said’ and ‘where’.
The children practise their reading with books that match the phonics and the ‘tricky words’ they know. They start thinking that they can read and this does wonders for their confidence.
The teachers read to the children, too, so the children get to know all sorts of stories, poetry and information books. They learn many more words this way and it also helps their writing.