Children across all years are taught phonics and spellings using the Sounds-Write programme. 

Sounds-Write is a quality first phonics programme. Its purpose is to provide classroom professionals with a comprehensive system with which to teach reading, spelling and writing. At Riverside, it will be introduced in YR, taught in KS1 and fine-tuned throughout the rest of Key Stage 2. In addition, it also serves very successfully as an intervention or catch-up programme.

Sounds-Write is acknowledged by the DfE as meeting all its criteria for an effective phonics teaching programme. It is a very highly structured, multi-sensory, incremental and code-oriented, instructional approach to teaching children to read and spell. The Sounds-Write programme provides fast and effective teaching for children at all levels.

Sounds-Write teaches all key elements of conceptual understanding, factual knowledge, and the three essential skills of blending, segmenting and phoneme manipulation necessary for learning to read and spell and it does so on a daily basis until all children achieve the automaticity that underlies the fluency of every successful reader.

Children in EYFS and KS1 take home three books, which can be changed frequently.

One book is a phonics book which is decodable and closely matches the current sounds being taught.

One book is colour banded and contains some phonically decodable text. These books can be read together with an adult.

One book is from the library and may be fiction or non fiction. These books will usually be read to the child by an adult as they are above the child's reading ability.

Further up the school, children continue to take a home a reading book, chosen from the library.