Phonics

Intent

At Grove Lea Primary School, we are passionate about ensuring all children become confident and enthusiastic readers and writers. We believe that phonics provides the foundations of learning to make the development into fluent reading and writing easier. Phonics is the process that is used to help children break down words into sounds, as well as building letter and word recognition. This can then enable children to use unknown words in the future. Children learn to segment words to support their spelling ability and blend sounds to read the words.

Implementation

Phonics at Grove Lea Primary School follows systematic approach, which is bespoke to our children and consistency is key. Teachers and leaders have attended Read, Write Inc Training and use the same structure when delivering sessions in all phase groups. This allows our phonics teaching and learning to be progressive from Nursery up to Year 2 as well as allowing children’s listening and speaking skills to develop.

Phonics is taught through differentiated group teaching, depending on children’s prior Phonics knowledge, and looking at where individuals need challenge or support. Where children require extra intervention, this is provided.

There are six phases within the Letters and Sounds programme: –

  • Phase 1 – Activities are divided into seven aspects. Environmental Sounds, Instrumental Sounds, Body Sounds, Rhythm and Rhyme, Alliteration, Voice Sounds and finally Oral Blending and Segmenting.
  • Phase 2 – Learning 19 letters of the alphabet and one sound for each. Blending sounds together to make words. Segmenting sounds into their separate sounds. Beginning to read simple captions.
  • Phase 3 – The remaining 7 letters of the alphabet, one sound for each. Graphemes such as “ch”, “oo” and “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 4 – 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 5 – 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 6 – Working on spelling, including prefixes and suffixes, doubling and dropping letters etc.

Right from their first day at Grove Lea Primary School, children are provided with lots of opportunities to engage with books that fire their imagination and interest, motivating and exciting them to learn.

Impact

Through using this creative and bespoke approach children have the fundamentals required to:

  • Decode letter-sound correspondences quickly and effortlessly, using their phonic knowledge and skills
  • Read common exception words on sight
  • Understand what they read
  • Read aloud with fluency and expression
  • Write confidently, with a strong focus on vocabulary and grammar
  • Spell quickly and easily by segmenting the sounds in words
  • Acquire good handwriting