It is crucial for children to develop a life-long love of reading. Reading consists of two dimensions: language comprehension and word reading. Language comprehension (necessary for both reading and writing) starts from birth. It only develops when adults talk with children about the world around them and the books (stories and non-fiction) they read with them, and enjoy rhymes, poems and songs together. Skilled word reading, taught later, involves both the speedy working out of the pronunciation of unfamiliar printed words (decoding) and the speedy recognition of familiar printed words. Writing involves transcription (spelling and handwriting) and composition (articulating ideas and structuring them in speech, before writing) 

Phonics is a method for teaching reading and writing by developing learners' phonemic awareness- the ability to hear, identify and manipulate phonemes -in order to teach the correspondence between these sounds and the spelling patterns (graphemes) that represent them. At King Edward, phonics is taught daily at 9am and usually lasts approximately 20 minutes. The format of the lesson is the same everyday which enables children to grow accustomed to the 4 different parts of the lesson. 

Blending to read

When phonemes (units of sound) are merged together to make a word.

To read an unfamiliar word, a child must link a sound (phoneme) to each letter in a word and then merge them together to say the word. d-o-g merges together to make dog

Segmenting to write

In order to spell the word cat, it is necessary to segment the word into separate sounds; c-a-t. Before writing a word young children need time to think about it, say the word several times, segment the word (using robot arms, jumps and claps) and then write it down. bag b-a-g