All children in EYFS and Year 1 have daily phonics lessons. Pupils are taught in phonics phase groups each morning for a period of approximately 20 minutes. The groups are reviewed regularly to ensure all children are working at the appropriate phase.

We utilise the Lancashire Red Rose Phonics Programme for children entering our EYFS and as they progress through Year 1 to support the delivery of phonics lessons. In Year 2 and Key Stage 2 where children receive additional phonics support, interventions follow the same systematic synthetic programme.

Staff tailor lessons to meet the requirements of the groups of children they are working with so that all children are able to make the best progress possible. This may mean that sometimes mnemonics are used to support children's acquisition and understanding of sounds.

There are six phases within the Letters and Sounds programme:

• Phase 1 – Activities are divided into seven aspects. Environmental Sounds, Instrumental Sounds, Body Sounds, Rhythm and Rhyme, Alliteration, Voice Sounds and finally Oral Blending and Segmenting.
• Phase 2 – Learning 19 letters of the alphabet and one sound for each. Blending sounds together to make words. Segmenting sounds into their separate sounds. Beginning to read simple captions.
• Phase 3 – The remaining 7 letters of the alphabet, one sound for each. Graphemes such as “ch”, “oo” and “th” representing the remaining phonemes not covered by single letters. Reading captions, sentences and questions. On completion of this phase, children will have learnt the “simple code”, i.e. one grapheme for each phoneme in the English language.
• Phase 4 – No new grapheme-phoneme correspondences are taught in this phase. Children learn to blend and segment longer words with adjacent consonants, e.g. swim, clap, jump.
• Phase 5 – Now we move on to the “complex code”. Children learn more graphemes for the phonemes which they already know, plus different ways of pronouncing the graphemes they already know.
• Children then move on to no nonsense spelling.

To support the teaching of letter formation during phonics, a consistent patter is used.

Reading is an integral part of everything we do at Thornton Primary School. Our School Library has been revamped and is now managed by our pupil ‘Reading Champions’. Their roles are to encourage and model a love of reading during break and lunchtimes. The aim is for all children to become fluent readers, who read for pleasure, by the end of KS2. All children across Key Stage 1 and Key Stage 2 have guided reading sessions each day following a consistent format. The approach to guided reading is developed sequentially across the school from working in small groups completing a range of different activities across the week in Reception and Year 1, to whole class guided reading in Years 2-6. Throughout the week each child will spend time decoding and discussing, predicting, retrieving and summarising what they have read.

Targeted interventions take place daily for those children who need extra reading practice. There are also phonics interventions for KS2 children who still require it.

Home reading books are initially phonics based when a child is at the earlier stages of acquiring reading knowledge and skills. All phonics reading books that are sent home are linked to the phase and sounds that a child has been learning in phonics lessons. This allows parents/carers to carry out reading with their child that reinforces what they have been taught in school. The majority of our home reading books are Collins Big Cat; these are high quality texts that help ensure children make accelerated progress in reading.

Supporting your child by reading to them, and with them, as regularly as possible at home makes a notable difference to their academic attainment and progress not only in reading but across the whole curriculum.

At the end of each day, all classes listen to a whole class reading book that further develops the children's passion and lifelong love for reading as well as providing an additional opportunity to acquire new vocabulary knowledge.