At Cradoc we give a high priority to the development of synthetic phonics.

Our phonics teaching follows the Read, Write, Inc scheme.  Pupils are introduced to phonics in Nursery.  The children are constantly assessed and when they are ready they join a Read Write Inc group.  In these groups, the children work in small focused groups with a teacher or teaching assistant.  When they start off, children learn a new sound (phoneme) almost every day.  Sounds are grouped into 3 sets and become progressively more complicated.  At the end of each half term the children will be assessed again to check they have made progress.

We teach the children the graphemes (the written form) that matches each phoneme (sound), so that they become familiar with how to write each sound.  This leads into handwriting of each sound, accompanied by a rhyme to help the child write and remember how to form the letter/s.

From a very early stage, pupils are encouraged to “blend” the sounds together to make words.  They also learn to “segment” words, ie to sound out each of the sounds within the word to enable them to spell the word.

In addition to the Read Write Inc programme the children will also be working on oracy, reading, and writing  skills in their classes with their own class teacher.  Please see the other pages for information.