At Springdale First School, we are passionate about ensuring all children become confident and enthusiastic readers and writers. We believe that phonics provides the foundations of learning to make the development into fluent reading and writing easier. Through daily, systematic and consistent high quality phonics teaching, children learn to segment words to support their spelling and blend sounds to read words. To ensure our children develop a strong phonic awareness and master effective blending and decoding skills, we have chosen to use a synthetic phonics programme written specifically for our children. Springdale Phonics is a fully comprehensive, synthetic phonics teaching programme designed to be used with children from Reception to Year 2. It is created specifically for our children, using our knowledge of best practice and the most up-to-date phonics guidance. The programme builds and develops the skills and understanding children need to become effective, independent readers and writers. We passionately believe that teaching children to read and write independently is one of the core purposes of a primary school, enabling them to access a broad and exciting curriculum and ensuring they flourish as learners throughout their time at our school. These fundamental skills not only hold the keys to the rest of the curriculum but also have a huge impact on children’s self-esteem and future life chances.