Early Reading & Phonics

At St. Wilfrid’s Catholic Primary School we believe that being able to read and write are the vital skills that enable us to understand and express ourselves more effectively.

These skills open the door to learning. We passionately believe in helping children to develop not only the technical skills of reading and writing, but also in engendering a love for literature and the different genres of writing.

Essential Letters and Sounds (ELS)

At St  Wilfrid's we use a strong, consistent approach to teaching phonics. We follow the DFE’s approved scheme: Essential Letters and Sounds. (ELS) The aim of ELS is ‘Getting all children to read well, quickly’.

Children begin learning Phonics at the very beginning of Reception and it is explicitly taught every day during a dedicated morning slot. Children are given the knowledge and the skills to then apply this independently. ELS teaches relevant, useful and ambitious vocabulary to support each child’s journey to becoming fluent and independent readers.

The structure of ELS lessons allows children to know what is coming next, what they need to do, and how to achieve success. This makes it easier for children to learn the GPCs (Grapheme Phoneme Correspondence) we are teaching (the alphabetic code) and how to apply this when reading.

ELS is a whole class teaching model. This means that every single pupil has the same opportunities when learning to read. Learning to read well, early, is a priority for every child. Children who may find it harder to learn how to read are given extra support from their teacher every day. We ensure that all children to learn to read well and keep up rather than have to catch-up.