Supporting Your Child

There are lots of things that you can do to support your child with their development and learning.

Here are some things that you might find interesting.

Here you can find examples of the Year 1 Phonics Screening Check

At Wellstead Primary School we use the Letters and Sounds Phonics Programme for all of our phonics teaching.

PhonicsLettersSounds

Letters and Sounds is a phonics resource published by the Department for Education and Skills in 2007. It aims to build children's speaking and listening skills in their own right as well as to prepare children for learning to read by developing their phonic knowledge and skills. It sets out a detailed and systematic programme for teaching phonic skills for children starting by the age of five, with the aim of them becoming fluent readers by age seven.

There are six overlapping phases. The table below is a summary based on the Letters and Sounds guidance for Practioners and Teachers. For more detailed information, visit the Letters and Sounds website.

Phase	Year Group	Phonic Knowledge & Skills
Phase One	Nursery/Reception	Activities are divided into seven aspects, including environmental sounds, instrumental sounds, body sounds, rhythm and rhyme, alliteration, voice sounds and finally oral blending and segmenting.
Phase Two	Reception	Learning 19 letters of the alphabet and one sound for each. Blending sounds together to make words. Segmenting words into their separate sounds. Beginning to read simple captions.
Phase Three	Reception	The remaining 7 letters of the alphabet, one sound for each. Graphemes such as ch, oo, th representing the remaining phonemes not covered by single letters. Reading captions, sentences and questions. On completion of this phase, children will have learnt the "simple code", i.e. one grapheme for each phoneme in the English language.
Phase Four	Reception	No new grapheme-phoneme correspondences are taught in this phase. Children learn to blend and segent longer words with adjacet consonants, e.g. swim, clap, jump.
Phase Five	Year 1	Now we move on to the "complex code". Children learn more graphemes for the phonemes which they already know, plus different ways of pronouncing the graphemes they already know.

Visit the Department for Education and Skills website to view the 'Letters and Sounds - Principles and Practice of High Quality Phonics' documentation.

Phonicspin Phonicsat

PhonicsBugClubLogo We support our teaching of phonics with bug club teaching tools, reading books and phonics e-books to give your children a firm, fun foundation in phonics with a complete phonics programme that's proven to raise reading standards. KS1 children have a unique log in code to allow them to enjoy reading and collecting bug club points. Visit the Active Learn website to find out more.

Reading

At Wellstead we use the series of 'Oxford Reading Tree' books to support reading. Biff, Chip and Kipper are loved by millions of children and are frequently ranked in the top ten of children's favourite characters.

Created by Roderick Hunt and Alex Brychta, these stories are guaranteed to hook your children into reading as they follow Biff, Chip and Kipper on their magical adventures. Not only that, they are perfectly matched to the new National Curriculum too!

ChipFloppy

Packed full of humour, drama, detailed illustrations and endearing characters to motivate every child
Perfect for the new National Curriculum
Carefully levelled to make sure every child makes real progress with their reading
Packed full of support, including revised notes to help with reading at home

Take a look for yourself at these links...

Once our children are confident with ORT characters and are able to sound and blend cvc words and recognise some high frequency words, they are moved onto coloured book banding books. This is to allow us to intersperse our main reading scheme with other schemes for breadth and variety.

These are banded using HIAS English Team Book Bandinh Guidance March 2016

Organising books in a gradient of challenge enables us to select texts to cater for the range of attainments within a class.

Colour book bands provide a structure within a range of fiction and non-fiction titles from different reading series ...this enables teachers to offer children a rich and varied experience of successful text reading (taken from 'Which Books and Why: Using Book Bands and book levels for guided reading in Key Stage 1')

Children are routinely book band tested each half term or before, if appropriate, to ensure that they are reading at the correct level. Book band tests look at decoding skills and comprehension skills and allow the teacher to assess what strategies the children are applying independently.

Children from Y3 upwards who have reached Lime band are encouraged to choose books from their class book box to ensure that they are continuing to receive a broad reading experience and that they have the opportunity of encountering traditional and modern classics.

Spellings

Throughout Wellstead we teach spellings in line with the new National Curriculum, please read either the KS1, KS2 or Year 6 letter relating to how this has been introduced, via these links:

Other useful documents relating to Spellings for each year group can be found here:

English

Here you can find the English Overviews for every year group. This shows you the end of year english expectations, including reading, writing and spelling. It also includes grammar and punctuation for year 5 and 6 in line with the new National Curriculum.