The Impact of Phonics 

By the time children leave Gawber Primary School they are confident readers that can read easily, fluently with a good understanding. 

At Gawber we teach competence in both word reading and comprehension. Through our daily Read Write Inc Phonics lessons, children are taught how to become skilled readers through being taught to read the 75 grapheme phoneme correspondences speedily.  Children become confident and resilient in tackling unfamiliar words by applying learnt knowledge and skills to segment and blend.  Strategies to read longer words are taught so children become skilled in segmenting words in to syllables and root words to enable them to tackle them confidently.  Common exception words and red words are taught explicitly, identifying the tricky letters so children are skilled at reading them at a glance. 

Alongside the teaching of word reading, children are taught comprehension skills from Foundation stage so children have an understanding of what they’ve read.

Our reading curriculum ensures that pupils’ build reading fluency over time as they move through the phonics programme developing the automaticity of skills. Children do not finish the Phonics programme until they are confident, accurate and fluent readers. 

By the time children leave Gawber Primary School they are also confident in applying their phonic knowledge to spelling using encoding.  Strategies to write longer words are taught so children become skilled in using syllables, root words and suffixes to spell.

When children leave Gawber they have secure knowledge in phonics to enable them to open the doors to so many different worlds and become independent life-long learners.