Phonological awareness is a child’s ability to hear and manipulate sounds of language. The first thing we do when we assess a young person is to check they know all 44 sounds made in the English language. We also check if they are able to segment the sounds in words, blend them back together, as well as delete and manipulate those sounds.  These are all crucial skills for reading and spelling success. We teach phonological awareness using a range of evidence-based resources, such as those written by David A. Kilpatrick.

What a mouthful! Check out this video for a better understanding of what this means, but essentially we teach phonics in a very direct, structured, rule-based way that builds upon itself. This tends to allow students a feeling of control over the often perplexing English language, as they can apply these rules logically. We have two different scope and sequences that we follow, depending on the child's level when they begin. Our practice in this area is informed by our knowledge of systematic phonics and the Orton Gillingham approach, as well as what is used in our decodable readers.

Decoding, or reading, is where students use letter-sound knowledge to sound out words and say them aloud.  The reverse of this is when students use their letter-sound knowledge to encode, or spell words. As such, our writing programme uses phonics to support students’ ability to spell everyday words, using simple tools like Elkonin Boxes.  We also work with our students on their ability to form letters, and employ both old fashioned writing activities and some awesome new technology, too.

To consolidate our teaching of phonics, we also include a repeated reading programme. This is supported by a wealth of evidence, and builds on what David A. Kilpatrick calls ‘word study’: repeated reading helps a child recognise words with greater automaticity, by exposing them to the same words again and again. An important part of this is teaching and practicing with our students how to break down unknown words so they can read them; this skill gives them a real sense of power over the world of words once they’ve mastered it. We support this with specially designed readings, pitched at an appropriate level for your child. For our younger students, and those needing to really consolidate their phonics knowledge, we use a range of decodable readers. These include the Little Learners series supported by Liz Kane Literacy as well as the Heggerty decodable reader series, allowing us to transition your child smoothly between decodable and non-decodable texts as their skills and confidence grow.  For our older students we have access to a number of excellent resources that give them a context to apply their decoding skills, and to build their bank of recognisable words.

The repeated reading texts we use play a big part in developing your child’s vocabulary. In particular, when we decode with them, we spend time checking if they know the meaning of tricky words which appear in the text. For students who require it, we assign vocabulary building homework, and incorporate this learning into their writing. We also support them to encode any awesome words we hear them using in conversation, to encourage them to move away from only using ‘safe’ words in their writing that they know are easy to spell.

Writing is an incredibly complex process, one that builds on a child’s knowledge of both oral language, and all the other skill areas described above. A child must not only come up with an idea and keep it in their head long enough to turn it into a piece of writing, but then they must be able to hold a pen, form the letters, spell the words, put full stops, commas and capitals in the correct place… As you can see, there are a lot of places that a child’s ability to write fluently can become tangled! 

If a child is struggling with many aspects of the writing process, we break it down to target one key area at a time. We apply the Writing Scope and Sequence developed by Dr Helen Walls, whose work is dedicated to understanding the Science of Writing. The Scope is broken into five key stages:

1 - Beginning to transpose and transcribe;
2a - Writing in sentences, re-reading and checking;
2b - Addressing difficulties (for example, letter formation);
3 - First steps into genre (narratives and reports);
4 - The writer's tool box, to advance written expression  (narratives, reports and persuasive pieces).

We know from the evidence that if handwriting is not yet fluent, this can affect written expression dramatically, and so our first goal would be to correct this. For other students, learning to encode (spell) the correct sounds within a word in the correct order will be the most important first step. We then work our way up, changing the child’s goals as they develop as a writer. This includes developing their skills in using figurative language, writing for a range of purposes using a raft of different text types, along with becoming an independent self-editor. For our older children, we encourage the use of computers for typing, alongside other forms of assistive technology, depending on what best suits their needs.

Often students who work hard to decode what they are reading spend all their mental energy simply getting through the text; they have no gas left in the tank to think about what the words actually mean. As a child’s fluency develops, we use a series of prompts to ensure they are developing a picture of the reading in their mind’s eye. Once they have mastered this skill, we can move on to more complex comprehension activities and begin to introduce higher order thinking skills, like predicting what will happen next, and ‘reading between the lines’.