At Watling Primary School, we welcome the opportunity to teach our children phonics and early reading skills from the very beginning of their primary school journey. We recognise the intrinsic part that reading plays in the ability of our children to access learning across all other curriculum areas. At Watling Primary School, we learn to read so that we can read to learn.
For this reason, it is essential that our approach to teaching phonics and reading is accessible to all learners, regardless of background or previous starting points.
At Watling Primary School, we believe that all our children can become fluent readers and writers. This is why we teach reading through Little Wandle Letters and Sounds Revised, which is a systematic and synthetic phonics programme.
Our Phonics and Early Reading Statement contains further information about our teaching approach.
Library
Our wonderful school library is used by all children every week and is one of our favourite spaces in school.
Visits to the library provide opportunities to promote our love of reading and explore and learn more about our individual interests. For this reason, we actively involve our children in deciding which books we purchase for our library.
Our feature tree showcases our library theme of the week and is used as a focal point for the teaching that takes place in each session. We use it to introduce and develop important aspects of reading such as the classification of different genres of books, recognition of leading authors and illustrators and exploration of personal reading preferences.
