At Weddington Primary School, we teach phonics through Read Write Inc., a Government approved phonics scheme. Like all phonics schemes, it teaches children the sounds in English, the letters that represent them, and how to form the letters when writing. Read Write Inc. Phonics includes reading books written using only the letters they have learnt at each level (and a small number of separately taught tricky words). The children will quickly feel confident and successful.

 

During daily Read Write Inc sessions, children will be taught a sequence of sounds and they will start to read and spell simple words.

 

To support your child to read and write at home, the methods below are used during the Read Write Inc phonics scheme.

 

Blending to read—Fred Talk

Blending means putting the sounds together to read words. ‘Fred’ (the frog) can only say the sounds, the children need to put the sounds together to make the word. For example: p-o-t… pot.

 

Segmenting to spell—Fred Fingers

Segmenting means to split the word up into individual sounds. We show this on our ‘Fred Fingers’.

Nonsense words

Nonsense words are ‘made up’. These words are used to help children to use their segmenting and blending skills accurately—linking sounds to letters.  For example, read g-e-f or l-ai-p. You can play a game called ‘Buried Treasure’ where real words go in a treasure chest but nonsense words go in the bin.

Red words

Red words are words that cannot be ‘sounded out’. This is because there is a letter or letters in the word that are ‘tricky’ - for example, the, I, no and go. These are words that children will learn by sight.  They are also known as ‘common exception words.’