Curriculum

Phonics

At Wygate Park Academy, we believe that reading is an essential life skill and we therefore provide the best start to a child’s reading journey through explicit and systematic teaching of a high-quality phonics programme. We follow the Phonics Shed programme which is a narrative driven scheme, using engaging characters, songs and stories to develop a love of reading and writing, alongside teaching the skill of reading in a detailed and comprehensive manner.

We aim to provide children with a solid foundation in decoding and segmenting to enable their reading journey to begin in the most successful way. At Wygate Park we:

• Provide consistent, daily, high-quality phonics teaching which is accessed by all children.
• We ensure that our phonics teaching is progressive throughout the Early Years and into KS1 to support their developing phonetic knowledge and understanding.
• Ensure our children leave KS1 being able to decode words confidently and apply this within their reading and writing.
• Enable children to use their phonic awareness across the curriculum, ensuring links are made between their learning to all subjects.
• Provide a rich reading environment which stimulates and engages the children and supports them in their development of segmenting and blending.

Ensure all of our children can identify, read and spell 90%+ of all high frequency words before they finish Year 2.

Reading Scheme

At Wygate Park Academy, we strive not only for excellence in reading but also for a lifelong passion for books. As a school, we have invested heavily into our reading curriculum providing both high-quality decodable books alongside inspiring and engaging reading for pleasure books. In addition to our narrative driven programme, Phonics Shed, we use the Big Cat Collins phonics reading scheme. This is closely aligned to our SSP programme and allows our children to become confident and fluent readers. The scheme covers a range of fiction and non-fiction books which are engaging and of high interest to our children.

Children at Wygate Park Academy, will remain on the phonics reading scheme until they are fluent readers with a great understanding of the written word. From here, the children will move onto our KS2 reading scheme, allowing their progress to be tracked throughout KS2 until they become ‘free readers’.

Each child from EYFS to Year 6 will also take home a reading for pleasure book that they can choose themselves from our extensive collection of high-quality reading books. This allows the children to develop their love of reading from the start of their primary school journey and beyond their time in Year 6. We are proud that our children leave Wygate with a lifelong love of reading.