Phonics
At David Livingstone Academy we teach reading through Linguistic Phonics. Our approach to phonics begins in Reception and continues to Year 6. The children, as well as having reading lessons, have explicit phonics lessons throughout their time at David Livingstone. The approach looks at the relationship between spoken language and the written word.
Children will study three main skills to enable them to learn to read: blending, the skills of blending graphemes (letters) together; segmenting, separating phonemes (sounds) for spelling; and manipulating, swapping phonemes to develop accuracy in reading. Throughout Key Stage 2, the children study the origins of words which will enable them to discover the meaning of new words.
All teachers receive SoundsWrite (Sounds-Write. A new approach to the teaching of reading, spelling and writing.) training to aid them to deliver linguistic phonics lessons. SoundsWrite takes the children step-by-step through phonics introducing them to the 44 different sounds in the English language and their different spellings gradually and systematically.