English

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At Greentrees, we follow a systematic synthetic approach to teach phonics in EYFS and KS1.  We use ‘Phonics Shed’, which is a narrative driven, multi-sensory, validated phonics scheme.   We use the scheme’s teaching books or e-books as well as their reading books, songs, letter formation animations and games to teach the children during their daily phonics lessons.

Within the Phonics Shed programme, there are consolidation and intervention lessons for those children across EYFS, KS1 and KS2 who have been identified as needing further or additional support to ensure they keep up.

Alongside Phonics Shed we use Phonic Tracker to enable us to track the children’s progress.  We assess children in KS1 and those children in KS2 who are yet to pass the phonics screen, on their phoneme recognition and ability to blend to read words with the phonemes they have been taught during the 5th week of every term.  The tracker identifies gaps for individuals or classes that we then plan interventions for.

Children take home a reading book(s) from our Phonics Shed decodable reading scheme.  These books are carefully selected by your child’s teacher to go alongside the GPCs your child has been taught in school. These books are for your child to read to you. It has been carefully chosen so that they can use the skills they have learnt in phonics to read all the words.  These books will also contain Common Exception Words.  These are words that have rare spellings so that they are not fully-decodable. For example, ‘of’, ‘the’, ‘to’ and ‘so’ are so common that they are handy to know before they are decodable.  Parts of these word the children have not learned to decode yet. They are taught to decode the part of the word they know, and they will be told how to say the part of the word they can’t decode yet. They are taught this way so your child can read longer texts sooner. You will find these CEWs in some of the reading books that get sent home.

Your child will also bring home a ‘Share with me’ book.  These are easily identifiable as they have a star sticker on the front.  We do not expect the children to be able to read these books independently (although of course they can if they want to!).  These books encourage children to develop their reading comprehension and can be used to practise the reading skills on their reading bookmark including retrieving, predicting etc.

Each year group has a set of the 50 Recommended Reads complied by the Books for Topics website.  Each set contains 50 book which have been specially chosen for reading for pleasure for each year group.  The books are age-appropriate and accessible books from a range of genres and styles.  They include fiction, picture books, non-fiction, poetry and graphic novels.  Different reading styles , interest levels and publication dates have been covered as each set includes some classics as well as some modern favourites.  The sets also contain a diversity of characters and settings ensuring we offer the children a wealth of quality reading choices to enjoy.

These are the books we get to know really well during our time at Greentrees: