Phonics - Read Write Inc

Phonics and Early Reading at Kingsley

At Kingsley CP, reading is at the heart of everything we do. We want every child to become a confident, fluent and enthusiastic reader who develops a lifelong love of books.

In EYFS and Key Stage 1, we teach children to read through Read Write Inc Phonics (RWI). Phonics is a huge part of our daily practice at Kingsley – you could say that we eat, drink and breathe phonics!

Children take part in a focused RWI lesson every morning, where they learn and revisit sounds, practise reading and spelling words, and apply their growing knowledge when reading books. Our consistent approach means that children hear the same language, use the same strategies and follow the same routines every day. This helps them build confidence and, most importantly, experience success as readers.

How children learn to read

Children begin by learning the sounds that letters and groups of letters make. In RWI, they learn Set 1, Set 2 and Set 3 sounds, gradually building up their phonic knowledge. This includes learning digraphs (two letters making one sound), trigraphs (three letters making one sound) and split digraphs (e.g. a-e).

Children then learn how to blend these sounds together to read words. At Kingsley, we talk about three important stages of learning to read:

1. Fred Talk – sounding it out

At first, children need to say each sound aloud before blending the sounds together to read the word.

For example:

c – a – t → cat

This is called Fred Talk. Fred the Frog can only speak in sounds, so children learn to help Fred blend those sounds together to make a word!

2. Secret Fred – sounding it out in your head

As children's confidence grows, we encourage them to stop saying every sound aloud. Instead, they look at the word, sound it out silently in their head, and then say the whole word aloud. We call this Secret Fred. This is an important bridge between sounding out every word and becoming a fluent reader. Your child may appear to pause briefly when they meet a word before saying it – this is often Secret Fred at work!

3. Speedy Reading – reading automatically

Eventually, children no longer need to sound out familiar words at all. They recognise them quickly and read them automatically. We call this Speedy Reading. This automatic word recognition frees children to concentrate less on decoding individual words and more on understanding and enjoying what they are reading.

As children become increasingly fluent, we also work on pace and expression – or "storyteller voice". In school, our repeated reading progresses from accuracy, to pace, and finally to storyteller voice.

Rotten Red Words

Children will often talk about Rotten Red Words at home. These Red Words contain parts that cannot be decoded using the phonics the children know. These words need to be remembered by sight only – as we say at Kingsley, "You can't Fred a red!"

Understanding the text

Being able to decode the words on a page is only part of becoming a reader. We also teach children to understand, discuss and enjoy what they read. Children develop comprehension skills by talking about books, retrieving information and beginning to make inferences – using clues from the text to work things out. Our RWI books contain questions at the back that can be used to develop children's understanding of the text, so feel free to refer to them at home! We want children to talk about stories, wonder what might happen next, discuss characters and their feelings, notice interesting vocabulary and, above all, see reading as something enjoyable and meaningful.