South Padbury Primary School is pleased to be able to offers students who are having difficulties learning their sounds and/or could benefit from extra support with beginning reading and writing skills, the opportunity to participate in a small group support program called the PUP program. Students must know the letters of the alphabet, the sounds those letters make and be able to decode or sound out words before being able to read.
Early intervention and small group support to master phonic concepts and word decoding is an effective way to improve these necessary pre-reading skills, and attending the PUP sessions keeps students moving forward, ensuring they don’t have any phonic gaps.
PUP is based on the PLD Sounds program which is a successful, research and evidence based synthetic phonics program that is designed to teach children to read and spell through phonological awareness and phonics. It involves learning through structured practise, games and chanting, while working at a pace that is suitable for the children who are learning. Students are grouped based on targeted phonic concepts. Students may feel like they are learning phonic concepts they already know and understand, however testing often shows that while students may understand phonic concepts, they are not ‘banked’ in their long-term memory and aren’t able to apply those phonic concepts with consistency when reading and writing.
The school has three trained education assistants who run the program and offer their time before school to ensure students don’t miss out on in-class language learning during the day.
Student progress is monitored termly by class teachers using a tracking assessment spreadsheet, and groups may change termly according to needs or when students have mastered the necessary phonic knowledge.
Please see the links below for further information.