At The Vine we teach your child phonics using the Read, Write, Inc phonics programme. Below is a video which helps to explain what phonics is. 

How is Phonics taught at The Vine? 

Pupils throughout Reception and Year 1 take part in a daily Phonics lesson for 30 minutes each day. This is taken by a member of staff who has been trained in delivering RWI. Your child will be in a group which is matched closely to their phonics ability and teaching is planned to close any gaps and ensure they make progress. Pupils who are in Year 2 and above who still need support with phonics also take part in these daily sessions. Pupils are assessed each half term to ensure that they are making progress. Additional support is given to pupils who are not making expected progress through the RWI Tutoring programme. This happens each afternoon. 

What is my child taught? 

Children learn the 44 phonemes (speech sounds) and their associated graphemes (how these are written) through a system of synthetic phonics. In addition to this, pupils learn to read and spell appropriate high-frequency and exception words for their age group.

Each session gives an opportunity for children to:

•  Learn new sounds
•  Review sounds already learnt
•  Develop their sight vocabulary of green words (words that you can decode using your knowledge of phonemes)
•  Develop their sight vocabulary of red words (words that you can not decode using your knowledge of phonemes)
•  Develop their ability to decode nonsense words (words that test their ability to use phonics, but are not real)
•  Apply phonetic knowledge to reading storybooks by blending (commonly referred to as sounding out and then reading the word)
•  Segmenting the words for spelling (breaking the words back into sounds).

Sounds are taught in 3 different sets. Set 1 sounds are mainly single letter sounds. When teaching pupils to say the sounds we emphasise the pure sound e.g. 'm' and not 'muh', 's' and not 'suh'. Please see the video link below on how to help your child pronounce the sounds correctly. 

Once these are embedded pupils then progress onto learning digraphs and trigraphs (sounds that are made up of a combination of 2 or 3 letters). 

Here are some useful resources which help to explain the sounds taught, when they are taught and the rhymes that the pupils learn to help remember each sound. 

RWI Story Books

Once your child has begun to learn the sounds we teach them how to put them together to read words. For example, c, a, t = cat, sh, o, p = shop. This is called blending (or as RWI call it, Fred Talking). Once they can blend words independently they will begin to bring home a RWI Story Book. These are grouped into colours starting with small lilac blending books, then to red books and progressing all the way to Grey books. These books are matched to your child's phonics ability. Story books form an important part of our daily phonics lessons. Your child will have been taught how to read the sounds, Green decodable words and Red tricky words in their previous week's learning so they should be very familiar with the text. We need them to become fluent at reading the words in their book, which means that they are able to recognise most of the words on sight. We call this Speedy Reading. Below is a link to a document which gives you advice on how to support your child's reading at home using the RWI Story Books. 

Here is a link to the RWI film 'How to use the Virtual Classroom'. This will introduce you to the short phonics films which you will be able to access with your child. Each film focuses on one sound and follows the same routine that our phonics lessons in school follow. In the documents below you will find QR codes for Set 1 and Set 2 sounds. 

Fresh Start

For those pupils who still need extra support with their phonics in Years 5 and 6 we use the Fresh Start programme, which is part of the RWI scheme. Pupils are identified through assessments then grouped and taught using weekly modules. These modules are based on age appropriate texts and are accompanied by anthologies of reading material which ensures pupils get exposure to a wide range of texts. Pupils are taught daily during Guided Reading sessions by members of staff who have been trained to use the Fresh Start programme. If your child is following this programme you will be notified by their class teacher and further information about the programme will be passed on.