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Phonics
Phonics
Intent
Reading is the key that unlocks the whole curriculum so the ability to efficiently decode is essential. At St John’s, we use the Letter and sounds synthetic phonics programme to teach our children the core skills of segmenting and blending and to start them on their ‘reading journey’.
Letters and Sounds Phonics is an inclusive programme for all children learning to read. Children learn the 44 common sounds in the English language and how to blend them to read and segment them to spell.
Implementation
At St John’s the children are set across their year group, according to the phase of Letters and Sounds they are working on. They receive 20 minutes focused phonics teaching per day and extra sessions if needed.
Letters and Sounds is a phonics resource published by the Department for Education and Skills in 2007. It aims to build children's speaking and listening skills in their own right as well as to prepare children for learning to read by developing their phonic knowledge and skills. It sets out a detailed and systematic programme for teaching phonic skills for children starting by the age of five, with the aim of them becoming fluent readers by age seven.
here are six overlapping phases. The table below is a summary based on the Letters and Sounds guidance for Practitioners and Teachers. For more detailed information, visit the Letters and Sounds website.
|
Phase |
Phonic Knowledge and Skills |
|
Phase One (Nursery/Reception) |
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 (Reception) up to 6 weeks |
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 (Reception) up to 12 weeks |
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 (Reception) 4 to 6 weeks |
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 (Throughout Year 1) |
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 (Throughout Year 2 and beyond) |
Working on spelling, including prefixes and suffixes, doubling and dropping letters etc. |
Impact
Through the teaching of systematic phonics, our aim is for children to become fluent readers by the end of Key Stage One. This way, children can focus on developing their fluency and comprehension as they move through the school. Attainment in phonics is measured by the Phonics Screening Test at the end of Year 1.