Communication, Language and Literacy
Our main objective throughout the school is to provide children with a means to communicate. If children are given the opportunity and a means to communicate, they can achieve! We work very closely with our experienced speech and language therapists ( SaLT) who provide training to all of our staff, enabling our children to receive appropriate support and teaching strategies throughout their school day.
The SaLT also provide signing and use of symbol training to staff and parents. Signs are used throughout the day to support communication. We have ' signs of the week' that are taught in class and shared with all staff and parents . Pupils demonstrate the signs to parents in our weekly 'Praise assemblies'.
The school has a signing choir led by our music HLTA . A signing song is introduced every half term; this is practiced in class and performed every week in the Praise assembly, supported by the signing choir.
Our school library provides a rich learning environment full of a variety of different books to meet every reader’s interest and need. Reading is an essential, transferable life-skill and it is important that every pupil at Kings Mill school is provided with the opportunity to learn to read at a level that is suitable, achievable and enriching for them. Strategies used to teach reading are tailored to each individual child’s need.
Phonics
Phonics is one method of teaching children how to read and write. Through phonics reading, children will learn how to make connections between sounds in words ( phonemes) and the symbols that we use to represent them (graphemes).
Phonics is all about sounds. There are 44 sounds in the English language, which we put together to form words.
Some are represented by one letter, like ‘t’, and some by two or more, like ‘ck’ in duck and ‘air’ in chair.
Children are taught the sounds first, then how to match them to letters, and finally how to use the letter sounds for reading and spelling. Once they've mastered this skill, they will be able to decode books and other texts.
Synthetic phonics refers to ‘synthesising’, or blending, the sounds to read words. It is based on the idea that children should sound out unknown words and not rely on their context.
For those ready to use a structure phonics approach, we use the DfE validated Twinkl Phonics and Bug Club Phonics programmes to help teach them to read. We follow the Twinkl SSP Phonics structured programme using the books from the Bug Club to supplement the teaching, as these support the needs of some of our learners.
