Phonics at Suffield Park
Phonics is the main approach we use to teach children to read at Suffield Park. It is a way of teaching reading, writing and spelling based on hearing and identifying letter sounds and matching them to letters or letter patterns. We use a scheme called Unlocking Letters and Sounds.
Unlocking Letters and Sounds, which was validated by the DfE in December 2021. We begin teaching phonics in the first few weeks of term 1 in Reception and children make rapid progress in their reading journey. Children begin to learn the main sounds heard in the English Language and how they can be represented, as well as learning ‘Common Exception’ words for Phases 2, 3 and 4. They use these sounds to read and write simple words, captions and sentences. Children leave Reception being able to apply the phonemes taught within Phase 2, 3 and 4.
In Year 1 through Phase 5a, b and c, they learn any alternative spellings and pronunciations for the graphemes and additional Common Exception Words. By the end of Year 1, children will have mastered using phonics to decode and blend when reading and segment when spelling. In Year 1, all children are screened using the national Phonics Screening Check.
In Year 2, phonics continues to be revisited to ensure mastery of the phonetic code and any child who does not meet age related expectations will continue to receive support to close identified gaps.
To ensure no child is left behind at any point in the progression, children are regularly assessed and supported to keep up through bespoke 1-1 interventions. These include GPC recognition and blending and segmenting interventions. The lowest attaining 20% of pupils are closely monitored to ensure these interventions have an impact.
Reading Scheme
At Suffield Park Infant and Nursery we promote a ‘phonics first’ approach and in both our guided reading sessions at school and in the books children take home, texts are very closely matched to a child’s current phonics knowledge so that every child can experience real success in their reading. In these crucial early stages of reading, we primarily use books from Ransom Reading Stars Phonics and Collins Big Cats, to ensure complete fidelity to the Unlocking Letters and Sounds progression we follow.
Once children progress beyond decodable texts, they move onto our book scheme so that they can continue to progress in their decoding, fluency and comprehension skills to become avid, expert readers.
Phonics is the main way we teach children to read at Suffield Park. It is a way of teaching reading, writing and spelling based on hearing and identifying letter sounds and matching them to letters or letter patterns. We use a scheme called Unlocking Letters and Sounds.
What is phonics?
Phonics is the link between the words we say and the letters that represent each sound. It teaches how the letters in written words represent the sounds we say in spoken words, this is called decoding. When we read we decode written words by converting graphemes into phonemes.
Terms we use in phonics:
- Grapheme – is a letter or sequence of letters that represent a phoneme he written letter or groups of letters
- Phoneme – a single spoken sound eg c in cat or sh in ship that the grapheme makes
- Digraph- two letters making one phoneme eg. sh
- Trigraph- three letters making one phoneme eg. igh
It is important that we teach the children to say sounds clearly and purely so they can blend these sounds to read words. This skill is tricky and can take some time to master. There are approximately 44 phonemes in the English language each made up of one or more letters.
Common exception words
These are words we use a lot in English such as the, like, said and were. We teach children to recognise these words by sight as some of the words can be tricky to decode.
Spelling
Your child will learn how to write words and sentences in phonics by segmenting words to spell. We separate the phonemes so we can hear the sound to spell words, we use phoneme fingers to count the phonemes.
Phases
We start teaching phase 2 in Reception and will teach phase 3 and 4 by the end of Reception. Phase 5 is taught in Year 1.
Your support at home is vital if the children are to make progress and love reading. Please regularly practise their phonemes, words and books. Use their red record book to record how they get on.
Please ask if you have any questions.
