Early Reading

Read Write Inc Phonics

Our Intent

At Summerfields Primary Academy, staff have a passionate and aspiring vision to embed the teaching of early reading. Our intention is to ensure that children are provided with the necessary skills and confidence in the early stages of reading development that will ignite a love of reading and, when intertwined with the teaching of a global curriculum, will expand our children's horizons in order for them to succeed.  This intent fully supports our school values of ENJOY, GROW, show RESPECT and show RESILIENCE. We provide a safe and happy environment where children of all backgrounds, needs and abilities can learn and grow.

Teach a child to read and keep that child reading and we will change everything.

And I mean everything. 

Jeanette Winterson - Author

Your child will begin the Read Write Inc Phonics programme when they start at Summerfields in FS2 (Reception). 

What is Read Write Inc?
When teaching your child to read, we do not use letter names at this early stage.  Many schools use different phonics schemes to teach children to read. Read Write Inc, often referred to as RWI, is our chosen systematic synthetic phonics system. We belive it is the best scheme to support your child in learning to read.  Your child will be assessed and grouped according to their phonics ability, working in small groups with a teacher or teaching assistant.  Read Write Inc uses pure sounds: it removes the 'uh' sounds from words.

 Link to a video showing pronunciation using pure sounds. 

Phoneme
Your child will learn a new sound every day accompanied by a handwriting rhyme which helps them to remember how to form the letter shape when writing it. A phoneme is the smallest unit of sound in speech. This may be one letter, or a group of two or three letters which make one sound.   For example, if your child was learning the phoneme (sound) ‘a’, they would also learn the rhyme ’round the apple and down the leaf’ when they start to write their letter.  In set 1, your child will learn 44 phonemes.

Speed Sounds
When teaching your child phonics, we will use the term 'speed sounds'. These are individual sounds which your child will learn how to read quickly and effortlessly as they progress through Reception, Year 1 and Year 2. Your child will be regularly assessed to ensure they are making progress and reaching their full potential and in order to enable staff to organise additional booster sessions if appropriate.  

Speed Sounds Set 1

In Reception, your child will learn the sounds Set 1 sounds by sight. They will also learn how to blend them together to read words e.g. c-a-t  = cat.

 To begin with, we learn a sound a day. We use pure sounds so that your child will be able to blend the sounds into words more easily. Letter-sound pictures are used to help your child learn these sounds quickly. e.g. mmaisie mmmountain is turned into m.

Set 1 sounds are taught in the following order. Sounds that are written with two letters are known as 'special friends'. 

m, a, s, d, t, i, n, p, g, o, c, k, u, b, f, e, l, h, sh, r, j, v, y, w, th, z, ch, qu, x, ng, nk

Once they have learnt the first 5 sounds, children are taught to blend them. When we say words in pure sounds, we call it ‘Fred Talk’. E.g. p-a-n, c-l-a-p. We never use letter names at this early stage

What is Fred Talk?

Staff will introduce your child to a toy frog called Fred once they are ready to start reading words. Fred can only say the sounds in a word and needs your child to help him read the word. Fred will say the sounds and children will work out the word. For example, Fred will say the sounds c–a–t, and children will say the word cat. This is Fred Talk: sounding out the word.

Below is a link to RWI training about Fred Talk. 

Blending
As your child learns each sound (phoneme), they are taught how to blend the sounds together to make two and three letters words (Consonant Vowel Consonant or CVC words such as the word 'mat').  Your child will learn how to read real and nonsense words.

Speed Sounds Set 2

Each set 2 sound is known as a ‘special friend’ as two letters go together to make one sound (a diagraph). Each of the special friends has a rhyme (known as a ditty) to go with it. Set 2 sounds are shaded grey below, with an example of a set 2 card that would be used to teach the sound. 

Speed Sounds Set 3

When studying the Set 3 sounds, children will move on to alternative diagraphs. For example, they will learn the diagraph ‘ai’ and ‘a-e’ as an alternative to the ‘ay’ diagraph learnt in set 2. The set 3 sounds are highlighted below. 

Green Words
Alongside this, your child will start to read 'green' words.  'Green' words are words which can be sounded out and blended like ‘dog’, ‘cat’.  There are green words associated with each set of sounds. 

Red Words
Having gained confidence sounding out green words, your child will be taught about ‘red' words.  These words are tricky words - words which can’t be sounded out phonetically like ‘to’ and ‘go’.  As your child progresses through FS2 (Reception) and KS1 (Year 1 and Year 2), they will learn these 'red' words by sight.

The green and red words you child will learn to read can be found below on powerpoints. 

Reading books

In reception, children will begin with wordless books. Sharing wordless books is a terrific way to build important literacy skills, including listening skills, vocabulary, comprehension and an increased awareness of how stories are structured.

From here, children will progress to blending books in order to support the skill of blending single words before reading larger texts. 

When they are learning set 1 sounds, children will bring home a red, green or purple book bag book. When they are learning set 2 sounds, children will bring home a pink, orange or yellow book bag book. When they are learning set 3 sounds, they will bring home blue or grey book bag books. 

These RWI book bag books link closely to the sounds they have been practising in school for practice, consolidation and confidence building.