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Development of Reading & Writing

At Daventry Hill School we use a systematic approach, Read Write Inc, to teach pupils synthetic phonics. 

Synthetic phonics is a way of teaching children to read. This begins with learning that sounds are represented by written letter. During their Read Write Inc sessions the children learn to read the 40+ sounds. Followed by how to blend the sounds together to make and read words. Children learn to blend these sounds into words by using Fred Talk through oral rehearsal. 

The children's reading books are accurately matched to our Read Write Inc reading scheme, which ensure that our pupils only access books they are able to accurately blend.   This means that children experience success from the very beginning of their reading journey. Lively phonic books are closely matched to their increasing knowledge of phonics and ‘tricky’ words and, as children re-read the stories, their fluency increases.
Once our pupils are reading Read Write Inc books fluently they can then begin to access our Oxford Reading Tree Scheme of books to continue to develop their reading and comprehension skills throughout the school.

Mark Making is the beginning of our journey into writing for a number of our pupils.  As well as enabling a child to learn to write, making marks can benefit a child physically and also help to develop their imagination and creative skills. As part of systematic teaching of English we begin to introduce them to Talk for Writing.  Talk for Writing is an engaging teaching framework developed by Pie Corbett.  It enables children to imitate the language they need for a particular text type orally, before reading and analysing it and then innovating their own version.  It begins with the use of sensory stories, drama, imitating and reciting a story. This immerses the children in the language of the story, which they begin to internalise to develop their own language and storytelling skills.  This is followed by a process of innovation and then invention, where pupils can modify the story and invent their own unique creations.

In Skills for Life (Key Stage 4 ) students have the opportunity to work towards functional skills accreditations in English which have reading, writing and speaking and listening components. These accreditations are offered at Entry Level, Level 1 and Level 2. This will continue into Foundations for the Future (Post 16) where appropriate.