Phonics & Early Reading Curriculum

Why Do We Teach Phonics?

Teaching children to read is an essential part of their learning. Reading is a skill that helps to develop vocabulary and improve understanding of words. In synthetic phonics lessons, children learn the relationship between letters and sounds. Teaching them to recognise the sounds each letter makes and how to put them together, enables them to read. It also helps with spelling as they learn how to break up words into sounds, in order to spell them. The idea that surrounds synthetic phonics is that once they are comfortable with the letters and sounds that make up words, children should even be able to read ‘nonsense’ words that don’t actually exist in the English language.

Our Aims:

· To establish a cohesive whole-school approach with progression and continuity in the teaching and learning of phonics throughout the school with a focus on quality first teaching.

· To ensure that systematic synthetic phonics (following the Twinkl Phonics programme) is the first approach pupils use to help with their reading and spelling.

· To ensure children learn to read and write all 44 graphemes in the English language.

· To ensure children have specific strategies to identify and decode common exception words (tricky words).

· To have robust assessment procedures to check progress and identify pupils in need of intervention.

· For pupils to apply their phonic knowledge in their reading and writing across the whole curriculum.

· For pupils to develop a love of reading and enjoy reading for pleasure confidently across a range of genres.

Objectives:

· To provide consistent, high-quality phonics teaching that ensures all children have a strong foundation upon which to tackle the complex processes of reading and writing.

· To ensure that the teaching of synthetic phonics is systematic and progressive throughout the foundation stage, key stage one and key stage two for those children needing interventions to support phonetic knowledge and understanding.

· To ensure that children have strong phonetic knowledge, understanding and skills so that they can decode words confidently and engage with higher-order reading and writing skills.

What Is Phonics?

Phonics is a way of teaching children how to read and write. It helps children hear, identify and use different sounds that distinguish one word from another in the English language. The Department of Education establishes the core criteria for effective systematic synthetic phonics teaching programmes. Using phonics programmes, children are taught to read and write using phonics, which is by directly linking phonemes (sounds in words) and graphemes (the symbols used to represent them).

In the UK, phonics for children is an important feature of the curriculum. Children learn phonics through a curriculum scheme such as Twinkl Phonics. Phonics is considered the best way to teach children to read.

How We Deliver Our Phonics Teaching

We use Twinkl Phonics as our systematic, synthetic phonics programme (SSP). It is high quality and robust in its purpose. With a clear, structured progression through the programme, it allows all of our pupils to meet or exceed the expected standard.

The Twinkl Phonics approach combines rigorous progression with engaging learning materials. We believe that children learn best when they are enjoying their learning and that this comes from a mix of bright, fun and engaging lesson resources within a clear and systematic approach that builds on children’s skills daily.

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Twinkl Phonics is a scheme based on Letters and Sounds. The scheme is divided into six phases:

• Phase 1: Beginning to recognise and differentiate sounds

• Phase 2: Learning 19 letters of the alphabet, with one sound for each. Starting to blend and segment sounds

• Phase 3: Learning the remaining 7 letters of the alphabet, with one sound for each.

• Phase 4: Blending and segmenting words with adjacent consonants

• Phase 5: Learning more graphemes and different pronunciations

• Phase 6: Applying the phonics knowledge learned in phases 1 - 5 to develop greater fluency in reading, as well as improved accuracy in spelling.

The Phonics Screening Check is a statutory reading check which every child in Year 1 is required to take towards the end of the school year. Please click on the link below which will provide you with more information about the check:

Phonics Screening Information for Parents

Phonics works best when children are given plenty of encouragement and learn to enjoy reading and books. Parents play a very important part in helping with this.

You can highlight the phonics sounds when you read with your child. Teaching how sounds match with letters is likely to start with individual letters such as ‘s’, ‘a’ and ‘t’ and will then move on to two-letter sounds such as ‘ee’, ‘ch’ and ‘ck’.

With all books, encourage your child to ‘sound out’ unfamiliar words and then blend the sounds together from left to right rather than looking at the pictures to guess.

Once your child has read an unfamiliar word, you can talk about what it means and help them to follow the story.

In addition to this, please click on the links below to some Phonics games you can play with your child at home.