At Overstone Combined School, we believe that literacy and communication are key life skills and that it is our role, through our broad and rich curriculum, to help children develop the skills and knowledge that will enable them to communicate effectively and creatively with the world at large, through spoken and written language. Through a love of reading that is shared across our school, we strive to ensure all children enjoy and appreciate literature and its rich variety.
We know how important early reading skills are and how reading unlocks the barriers to future learning that so, we are passionate about ensuring all children become confident and enthusiastic readers and writers. We believe that phonics provides the foundations of learning to pave the way for fluent readers and writers. Phonics is the process that is used to help children break down words into sounds, as well as building letter and word recognition. This is a key skill, not just in early reading but across the primary phase and beyond.
Phonics at Overstone Combined School follows the Read Write Inc programme. This allows our phonics teaching and learning to be progressive from Reception up to Year 2 and beyond. We work closely with our Pre-School, to ensure that the children starting school have phoneme awareness and speaking and listening skills.
Phonic teaching begins as soon as the children start school and are taught in a group, ensuring teachers follow a systematic plan of revisit, teach, practice, and apply - there can never be enough emphasis on applying! We ensure that phonics is present in various lessons throughout the school day. Phonics is regularly assessed and depending on children’s knowledge we are able to look at where individuals need challenge or support. Where extra intervention is necessary, this is provided for children throughout Key Stage 1 and Key Stage 2.
