Our aim at High Cliff Academy is to develop children's reading skills and promote a love for reading, by providing them with a strong foundation in phonics using a rigorous linguistic phonics approach.
Our approach to phonics begins in EYFS and continues to Year 6. The children, as well as having reading lessons, have explicit phonics lessons throughout their time at High Cliff Academy.
This approach looks at the relationship between spoken language and the written word: Pupils study three main skills to enable them to learn to read: blending, the skills of blending graphemes (letters) together; segmenting, separating phonemes (sounds) for spelling; and manipulating, swapping phonemes to develop accuracy in reading. Throughout Key Stage 2, pupils study the origins of words, which will enable them to spell and discover the meaning of new ones.
All teachers receive SoundsWrite (Sounds-Write. A new approach to the teaching of reading, spelling and writing.) training to aid them to deliver linguistic phonics lessons. SoundsWrite takes the children step-by-step through phonics introducing them to the 44 different sounds in the English language and their different spellings gradually and systematically.
We use decodable texts that align with the code that children have been taught to ensure that children have repeated practice of decoding and orthographic mapping, resulting in fluency.
In Key Stage 2 they revisit the code to secure their knowledge. Alongside this, we focus on the study of the English language, exploring the morphology and etymology of words which will help children to understand the meaning of prefixes, suffixes and root words.