Our Early Years team are committed to ensuring that communication and language is the foundation of our curriculum here at Charnwood. Providing opportunities to share stories building familiarity with key texts and traditional tales enables our pupils to develop a rich and varied vocabulary. Our learning environments are carefully planned for from the needs of our children, their interests and enhanced through the links to our themes and key texts, providing endless opportunities for children to use new vocabulary in their play.
We recognise the importance of sharing stories with children regularly and as a consequence launched our ten minute reading pledge. We pledge to share a story/stories for at least ten minutes within school everyday. Parents/carers pledge to match this story sharing time at home each day.
When becoming a reader, phonics is important but learning to read also involves the development of important skills;
To support our ten minute reading pledge Early Years have developed a story time library. Children have access to the library each day and are invited to take story books home to share with parents and carers.
Our aim is to build a bank of familiar stories for each child to enable them to build rich vocabulary whilst providing regular opportunities for them to demonstrate an understanding of what has been read.
Our intent is to equip our pupils with the skills and knowledge required to become fluent readers by age seven. We follow the Bug Club Phonics SSP programme, which follows the Letters and Sounds progression, as a school with an aim to build children’s speaking and listening skills as well as to prepare children for learning to read by developing their phonic knowledge and skills. Practitioners follow a detailed and systematic programme for teaching phonic skills to ensure consistency through actions, rhymes and the teaching sequence. However, there is flexibility within the planning to adapt the sessions to make them engaging.
The link below will take you to the PDF where you can find all of the letter formation rhymes:
https://www.charnwood.staffs.sch.uk/documents/1634060141.pdf
There is also a guide to readingwise available here:
https://www.charnwood.staffs.sch.uk/documents/1610637109.pdf
Bug Club Phonics is supported by decodable readers which match the order of phoneme introduction. All of our home readers are decodable and have been organised to match the Bug Club Phonics progression. There are a variety of books to match each unit of the teaching programme. Following half termly assessments children are matched to the correct unit of home reader. Thus providing an opportunity for the children to practise and consolidate their learning at each stage.
When the children have completed the first two units of Bug Club Phonics, they will have acquired a sufficient number of grapheme–phoneme correspondences to start reading their own books. Prior to this there is a strong focus on communication and language where pre-readers will be sent home with guidance for parents.
The Bug Club also provides a library of eBooks that can be allocated to individual children post phonics teaching session. The Bug Club Phonics readers are designed to support children in practising and consolidating the knowledge they acquire during the whole-class Teaching Sessions. Bug Club’s online reading world helps children improve core reading skills at school or home with exciting texts and fun rewards. It also enables teachers to monitor every child’s progress.
Children will receive 1 home reader from the school reading library and at least 2 allocated eBooks from the Bug Club eBook library each week.
A guide to using the bug club at home can be found here:
https://www.charnwood.staffs.sch.uk/documents/1621855150.pdf
At Charnwood we place a great emphasis on our phonics teaching.
SUAT supports and leads in the set-up of new academies joining the partnership. The services provided by the central support function cover both educational and non-educational support. In terms of educational support, SUAT is linked to the School of Education of Staffordshire University, which is an outstanding ITT provider.