From when our children start in Reception they are exposed to listening and speaking opportunities which will form the foundations of learning to read and write. The more you talk with your child and encourage good listening and speaking skills the more likely they will flourish when asked to learn the sounds we use to read and write.
We are currently using ‘Letters and Sounds’ to teach phonic skills to our Early Years and Key Stage 1 children. To support with reading, all of our early reading books use a phonics based approach. Phonic patterns are used for spelling lists and are further developed through handwriting practise.
In Key Stage 2, those children who require further phonic support take part in small booster groups targeted to their specific needs. We use a variety of materials to plan for these groups which includes ‘Rapid phonics’.
At the end of Year 1 children will take the phonics screening test. Children who do not reach the threshold to pass the test will re-take the test in Year 2.
Here are the phonic steps we use in our school:
| Phase | Phonic Knowledge and Skills |
| Phase One | Activities are divided into seven aspects, including environmental sounds, instrumental sounds, body sounds, rhythm and rhyme, alliteration, voice sounds and finally oral blending and segmenting. |
| Phase Two | Learning 19 letters of the alphabet and one sound for each. Blending sounds together to make words. Segmenting words into their separate sounds. Beginning to read simple captions. |
| Phase Three | The remaining 7 letters of the alphabet, one sound for each. Graphemes such as ch, oo, th representing the remaining phonemes not covered by single letters. Reading captions, sentences and questions. On completion of this phase, children will have learnt the “simple code”, i.e. one grapheme for each phoneme in the English language. |
| Phase Four | No new grapheme-phoneme correspondences are taught in this phase. Children learn to blend and segment longer words with adjacent consonants, e.g. swim, clap, jump. |
| Phase Five | Now we move on to the “complex code”. Children learn more graphemes for the phonemes which they already know, plus different ways of pronouncing the graphemes they already know. |
| Phase Six | Working on spelling, including prefixes and suffixes, doubling and dropping letters etc. |
