Reading and Phonics

At Penryn, Phonics is taught through daily Read, Write Inc sessions in KS1 and Freshstart phonics in KS2. These comprise of learning different graphemes, focussing on oral phonological skills and sight vocabulary. During these sessions children are also explicitly shown how to apply their developing skills to their writing. All children are grouped in accordance with their individual needs.  

Approaches to Reading 

Our priority is both the teaching of reading skills and enjoyment of literature, enabling children to become lifelong, confident readers. As children build fluency, comprehension skills become our main area of focus and questioning looks at skills such as retelling, inference and prediction. All children will complete a ‘DERIC’ task weekly, which focuses on a different resource (such as blurbs, videos, pictures and texts) and children answer a ‘Decode’, ‘Explain’, ‘Retrieve’, ‘Infer’ and ‘Choice’ question for each of the resources.  

In EYFS and KS1, children are given Read Write Inc book bag books which are matched to the sounds that they are learning in their phonics sessions. When children are ready or when they have finished the phonics programme, children then move onto Accelerated Reader. Within AR the children quiz regularly on the books that they are reading and move through sub-levels that are closely matched to their reading level.  

Home reading is expected at least 5 times a week and is an integral part of the child’s development. In order to have strong communication between teachers and parents/carers, each child has a home learning journal where both the staff and parents can write comments about how the child is progressing with his/her reading.