Reading and Phonics

Our vision at Wayfield is to ensure that all children have access to a wide range of ambitious, relevant and engaging texts. It is our mission to put books into the hands and homes of our children. Reading should be an exciting, enthralling and immersive experience. Our Apple ecosystem has supported this aim and is used to enhance and enrich almost every aspect of the reading journey. Using the iPad, we have been able to grow our digital library of excerpts and phonetically decodable books, increase author diversity, digitise core texts and direct young readers - many with insatiable appetites for reading - to further online material which is often free. Recently, children have even been inspired to create their own interactive digital books based on their reading experiences. Furthermore, we have created support materials in Keynote to embed phonetic sound buttons and Voice Memo playback so that children can instantly hear and retry or feedback to peers.

The iPad has been an invaluable tool for developing our phonics provision for early learners, increasing reader independence and enhancing inclusion. Our digital resources for reading are curated by teaching staff to ensure content is directly linked to relevant authors, lesson content and topic themes. This unencumbered accessibility and proactive management of reading material ensures that children have the opportunity to explore texts from different cultures and share their own cultural experiences. We believe it is vital that our children are exposed to a range of exemplar texts, from a variety of genres, to embed ambitious vocabulary, promote inclusivity, promote fluency of comprehension and inference skills, increase cultural capital and secure their writing expectations across our curriculum.