Reading is at the heart of Lewknor C of E Primary School. We all strongly believe that fostering a love of reading and books from a young age is vital.
We are very excited to share with you a new venture that we are about to embark on as a school to ensure our children’s reading becomes even better than it currently is. Ofsted require every school to have a dedicated phonics scheme and after much research, we have decided to teach Phonics and Reading through ‘Twinkl Phonics’. Twinkl phonics is a government apporved scheme.
This will impact the way that both phonics and reading are taught for all children who are accessing phonics, particularly in Reception and Key Stage One. To support the new change, we have purchased some more books, received training and you will have access to a full online library.
What is Twinkl Phonics?
This whole-school programme provides a structured approach to learning; it is perfect for helping children progress from simple sounds to developing more complex and vital knowledge and skills required for reading.
Twinkl Phonics grounds its learning in stories; following the exciting adventures of Kit, Sam and the Twinkl Phonics family, children will build up their phonics skills and everything they need to read and write.
Children begin with identifying their first sounds (phonemes) and written representations of these sounds (graphemes) and finish year 2 with reading and writing skills that cover national curriculum statutory requirements.
This scheme takes children from being new readers to being confident, skilled and enthusiastic readers and writers. Our multisensory approach includes:
• engaging stories and activities focused on developing and applying reading and writing skills;
• physically active phonics activities to keep learning exciting and energising;
• mnemonics, actions, handwriting formation rhymes and songs to reinforce sound and letter recognition.
Rhino Readers and Lewknor’s Reading Scheme
As a school, we have identified how strong our children’s reading is and how much support they receive at home. With this in mind, we have decided to keep our reading scheme in place for this academic year but also provide children with a phonics decodable book (Rhino Readers).
The Rhino Readers books pair perfectly with the Twinkl Phonics teaching scheme. The books match up exactly to the phonics that they have learned. With fully decodable books, children can use their phonics skills to tackle every word and there’s no need to rely on guesswork or clues from the pictures. This helps them quickly gain confidence and feel successful when they read. Rhino Readers is a fully decodable reading scheme.
What will be coming home?
From January, there will be 2 types of reading book that your child will come home with:
- 1 Rhino Reader book matched to your child's phonic ability.
- 1 reading for pleasure book for you to read and share a love of reading with your child.
As usual, we will continue to change these books throughout the week.
- Reading Records
We will continue to use the Reading Records to note your child’s assigned books. It is important to us that the record is easy for families to complete so please sign when the book has been read or leave a short comment in the record to let us know how they got on.
We are getting up and running with the new scheme in school as soon as possible but once we have embedded it further we will contact parents about a session in school to explain the new scheme to you in person.
