Getting started

Before the first lesson, it is worth spending a little time on how your room is arranged and where your resources live. The sections below cover the decisions that make the biggest difference to the pace of a lesson.

Everything here can be done gradually — start with the reading area and come back to the rest once the routine is settled.

Setting up your reading area and story corner

Children read more when the books are visible, reachable and obviously theirs. Face the covers outwards wherever you can, and keep the number of titles on display small enough that the choice feels manageable.

Leave a clear floor space for the whole class to gather. A story corner that has to be rearranged before every session tends not to get used.

• Keep the current storybooks at child height
• Rotate the display every two or three weeks
• Give each reading group its own labelled shelf

Getting your Read Write Inc. Phonics resources organised

Sort the resources by how often they are used rather than by which programme they belong to. The cards and books you reach for every day should be within arm’s reach of where you teach; everything else can live in a cupboard.

Label the outside of every box with the group it serves. It is much quicker to hand a box to a teaching assistant than to explain which cards they need.

Organising books

Group the books by Storybook level, then by set within the level. Colour-coded spine stickers make it obvious at a glance when a book has been returned to the wrong place.

Keep a small reserve of each level aside. A single missing book can stall a whole group.

Organising sound cards

Speed Sound Cards get handled more than anything else in the room, so they need a home that survives being opened twenty times a day. A shallow open box beats a lidded one.

Keep the Set 1, 2 and 3 cards physically separate, and check the order at the end of the week rather than mid-lesson.

Organising Magnetic Speed Sound Cards

Magnetic cards want a vertical home: a board or a metal sheet at child height, with the sounds already in teaching order. Stacked in a drawer they lose their order immediately.

If more than one class shares a set, agree one order and write it inside the lid.