Phonics

Intent:
We teach early reading & phonics through an approach called Sounds-Write Phonics which teaches linguistic phonics. Linguistic phonics is synthetic phonics but more!

The rationale for linguistic phonics is that children are taught to understand the relationship between spoken language and written words right from the beginning – they don’t learn sounds in isolation. It starts with what the children naturally acquire, spoken language, and teaches them the relationship between sound-spelling correspondences.

Teaching children to read through linguistic phonics allows them to develop their decoding skills; this supports children in learning to blend graphemes (letters) for reading, segment phonemes (sounds) for spelling and manipulate phonemes (sounds) to develop accuracy in reading and spelling. Linguistic phonics teaches the concept that all sounds can be spelled. We therefore do not promote silent letters, magic letters or memorising whole words by sight.

Our Reception and KS1 teachers are trained to deliver the Sounds-Write phonics programme, this enhances our highly trained team to support the children’s progress throughout their primary education. Sounds-Write takes children through systematic, incremental steps to teach the 44 sounds in the English language and their multiple spellings.

Implementation:

In the Early Years Foundation Stage, children study the Initial Code. This teaches them the concept of one sound, one spelling. They begin with CVC words (consonant, vowel, consonant e.g. dog, mum, big). When all single-letter sound-spelling correspondences are taught, they discuss double consonant spellings (e.g. pull, miss, buzz). Once children understand the concept of two letters representing one sound, they are exposed to spellings with two different letters (e.g. ch in chip, sh in ship). As the programme progresses children learn to read and write words that follow the structure of VCC, CVCC, CCVC, CCVCC, CCCVCC, CCVCCC etc. such as ‘old,’ ‘pink,’ ‘crisps’ etc.

In Key Stage One, children learn the one, two, three and four letter spellings of sounds. This is called the Extended Code. They learn the concept that one sound can be represented by multiple spellings. For example, the first spellings of the /ae/ sound are included in rain, in play, in steak and in cake. They also learn the concept that one spelling can represent multiple sounds.

Impact:

Children's understanding is regularly assessed by the teachers during the year and banded books are given, read and monitored to check understanding and progress.  In addition, children at the end of Year 1 take part in a statutory phonics screening check. The purpose of the phonics screening check will be to confirm that all children have learned phonic decoding to an age-appropriate standard. Children who have not reached this level should receive extra support from their school to ensure they can improve their decoding skills, and will then have the opportunity to retake the phonics screening check.