In 2012, Wolsingham Primary School introduced the Read Write Inc. synthetic phonics programme. Its aim is to help the children learn many of the phonics (sounds) used in the English language to assist both reading and writing. It has been tried and tested over many years and takes a systematic and structured approach to teaching phonics.
Examples of how each letter and groups of letters (“special friends”) are said can be found on the Jolly Phonics site. The children are encouraged to use ‘pure sounds’, which means that they should not to add the ‘er’ sound after a letter, e.g. the letter ‘t’ is not pronouced ‘ter’ but is the first sound in “top”.
How does it work?
The children to decode by learning 44 sounds and matching letters/ letter groups; by learning to blend sounds to read words and by reading specially written books that include only the sounds that the children have been learning and therefore ensuring success as the children are never given anything that they can’t read. The English language has 44 phonemes (letter sounds), but more than 150 graphemes (the way the sound is written down) and therefore a very complex code. Through Read Write Inc., children are taught a simple code first before moving on to the complex code. To see the simple speed sounds and the complex speed sound charts used in Read Write Inc., please click on the documents below.
To learn how to pronounce the ‘pure sounds’ please click here.
Red Words
These are common words that do not follow the normal rules and are therefore not decodable. Children are taught to look at these words carefully and identify the part of the word that doesn’t follow the rule. Please click on the link below to find a list of these words.
Children also talk a lot about what they have read to show that they understand. They also listen to and discuss other ideas to deepen their understanding and therefore their comprehension. By using ‘Fred sounds’ children learn to blend sounds into words for reading and segment words into sounds for spelling.
Once children have completed the Read Write Inc. programme and can read fluently, they move on to read books on the Accelerated Reader Program.
