Merton Bank Primary School

Early Reading

Early Reading Leader: Miss B Brussels 

Children who read regularly and are read to regularly have the opportunity to open the doors to so many different worlds! More importantly, reading will give your child the tools to become independent life-long learners.

We can achieve this together through:

• Read Write Inc, a programme to help to your child read at school
• Encouraging children to develop a love of books by reading to them daily, at home and at school
• Giving children access to a wide range of books at school and at home

At Merton Bank, we use Read Write Inc Phonics (RWI) to give your child the best possible start with their reading. We have put together some useful information about how the RWI programme works, handy reading at home tip and some useful links.

Miss Brussels is our Read Write Inc lead teacher, so if you have questions about RWI, contact school who can refer you to her. Please take the time to read the information as it will provide invaluable information as to how you can help and support your child in reading.

What is Read Write Inc?

Read Write Inc (RWI) is a phonics programme which helps all children learn to read fluently and at speed so they can focus on developing their skills in comprehension, vocabulary and spelling. The programme is designed for children aged 4-7. However, at Merton Bank we incorporate aspects of the programme in Nursery and will continue teaching RWI to children beyond the age of 7 if they still need support in their reading.

RWI was developed by Ruth Miskin and more information on this can be found at https://ruthmiskin.com/en/find-out-more/parents/.

How will RWI be taught?

All children are assessed regularly by our RWI leader (Miss Brussels). Children are grouped based on their phoneme knowledge in groups of up to 10 children. RWInc sessions take place for 45 minutes, four times a week.

Children will be taught how to read as follows:

Letter Sounds

Children are taught the set 1 sounds, together with rhymes to help children form the letters correctly and instantly recognise sounds ready for blending. Children will also use pictures for each sound to help recognise the sound and then form the shape of the sound.

Fred Talk

We use pure sounds (‘m’ not’ muh’,’s’ not ‘suh’, etc.) so that your child will be able to blend the sounds into words more easily.

At school we use a puppet called Fred who is an expert on sounding out words! We call it, ‘Fred Talk’. E.g. m-o-p, c-a-t, m-a-n, sh-o-p, b-l-a-ck.

The following video is an example of blending sounds with Fred. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dEzfpod5w_Q

Nonsense words (Alien words)  

As well as learning to read and blend real words children will have plenty of opportunities to apply their sound recognition skills on reading ‘Nonsense words’. These words will also feature heavily in the Year One Phonics Screening check in the summer term. For further information on the screening check, please speak to Miss Brussels, Miss Rickers or Mrs Chuard.