St Clements Hill
Primary Academy
50 Le Safferne Gardens, Norwich, NR3 4AR Telephone: 01603 984737
Email: office@stclementsacademy.co.uk
Reading
Reading and stories sit at the very heart of our curriculum because our staff know that a child’s ability to read is one of the most important skills we can teach them.
We also love reading to children and reading with children. It’s so important that children hear books read aloud at home and at school.
We are developing our library and school book collection as the school grows. We are working with the Norfolk Children's Book Centre to ensure that we have a wide range of books to encourage all children to develop a love of reading.
Our book selection supports the curriculum we teach as well as providing a rich range of knowledge beyond the taught curriculum. We also strive for our book selection to be reflective of the school and trust’s values of: equity, inclusion and diversity. Our book selections encourage children to explore identities, focus on diversity and embrace difference.
Teaching Reading
At St Clements we follow a DfE validated phonics programme (Supersonic Phonics Friends) that follows the letters and sounds teaching sequence. We begin teaching phonics in Reception; children are taught to recognise the distinct sounds (or phonemes) that go together to make up words. Children learn to read by sounding out the individual phonemes in a word and then blending them to read a whole word. Through our daily teaching children quickly gain confidence to tackle unfamiliar words. Alongside our teaching of phonics we also teach the children ‘tricky words’ - these are words that cannot be sounded out.
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In Year 1 children take the National Phonics Screening Check in June. This involves working 1:1 with an adult (usually their class teacher) to sound out and blend a selection of real and ‘alien’ words. We run parent workshops to support parents in understanding what this entails and to look at samples of the test materials.