Reception

Welcome to Sycamore Class

We have 28 children in our class and our teachers are Mrs Hutchinson and Mrs Kaced. Mrs Hutchinson teaches Mondays, Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Thursdays. Mrs Kaced teaches Thursdays and Fridays. We have three teaching assistants who look after us throughout the week: Mrs Davies, Mrs Bishop and Miss A'Court. 

Sycamore

Welcome to Oak Class

The teachers in Oak Class are Mrs. Wynne and Miss Bolton. Mrs. Wynne teaches on Tuesday afternoons, Wednesdays, Thursdays and Fridays and Miss Bolton teaches on Mondays and Tuesday mornings. We have 27 children in our class this year. Our teaching assistants are Mrs. Dalmasso, Miss. Batty and Mrs. G. Davies.

Oak Class

Welcome to Blossom Class

We have 26 children in our class this year and our teachers are Miss Bolton and Mrs. Livesey. Mrs Livesey teaches us Mondays and Tuesdays and Miss Bolton teaches us Wednesdays, Thursdays and Fridays. Our Teaching Assistants are Mrs Rowan, Mrs Carroll, Mrs Brockbank and Mrs Little.

Blossom Class

Supporting your child with reading

Essential Letters and Sounds

Essential Letters and Sounds (ELS) is our chosen Phonics programme. The aim of ELS is ‘Getting all children to read well, quickly’. It teaches children to read by identifying the phonemes (the smallest unit of sound) and graphemes (the written version of the sound) within words and using these to read words.

Children begin learning Phonics at the very beginning of Reception and it is explicitly taught every day during a dedicated slot on the timetable. Children are given the knowledge and the skills to then apply this independently.

Throughout the day, children will use their growing Phonics knowledge to support them in other areas of the curriculum and will have many opportunities to practise their reading. This includes reading 1:1 with a member of staff, with a partner during paired reading and as a class. 

Children continue daily Phonics lessons in Year 1 and further through the school to ensure all children become confident, fluent readers.

We follow the ELS progression and sequence. This allows our children to practise their existing phonic knowledge whilst building their understanding of the ‘code’ of our language GPCs (Grapheme Phoneme Correspondence). As a result, our children can tackle any unfamiliar words that they might discover. 

Children experience the joy of books and language whilst rapidly acquiring the skills they need to become fluent independent readers and writers. ELS teaches relevant, useful and ambitious vocabulary to support each child’s journey to becoming fluent and independent readers.

We begin by teaching the single letter sounds before moving to diagraphs ‘sh’ (two letters spelling one sound), trigraphs ‘igh’ (three letters spelling one sound) and quadgraphs ‘eigh’ (four letters spelling one sound).

We teach children to:

• Decode (read) by identifying each sound within a word and blending them together to read fluently

• Encode (write) by segmenting each sound to write words accurately.

The structure of ELS lessons allows children to know what is coming next, what they need to do, and how to achieve success. This makes it easier for children to learn the GPCs we are teaching (the alphabetic code) and how to apply this when reading.

ELS is designed on the principle that children should ‘keep up’ rather than ‘catch up’. Since interventions are delivered within the lesson by the teacher, any child who is struggling with the new knowledge can be immediately targeted with appropriate support. Where further support is required, 1:1 interventions are used where needed. These interventions are short, specific and effective.

Supporting Reading at Home:

• Children will only read books that are entirely decodable, this means that they should be able to read these books as they already know the code contained within the book.
• Each Friday your child will bring home 1 x decodable book and 1 x book to share.
• To best support us we ask that the children read the decodable text provided by school four times across the week.
• Spending just 10 minutes a day reading with your child will hugely support them on their journey to becoming an independent reader.
• We only use pure sounds when decoding words (no ‘uh’ after the sound)
• We want children to practise reading their book 4 times across the week working on these skills:

                Decode – sounding out and blending to read the word.

                Fluency – reading words with less obvious decoding.

                Expression – using intonation and expression to bring the text to life!

We must use pure sounds when we are pronouncing the sounds and supporting children in reading words. If we mispronounce these sounds, we will make reading harder for our children.

Please watch the videos below for how to accurately pronounce these sounds:

Phase 2 Pronunciation video

Phase 3 Pronunciation video

Phase 5 Pronunciation video

At the beginning of each academic year, we will hold an information session for parents and carers to find out more about what we do for Phonics, Reading and English at our schools. Please do join us.

More support for parents and carers can be found here:

https://home.oxfordowl.co.uk/reading/reading-schemes-oxford-levels/essential-letters-and-sounds/  

Reception Newsletters