How we teach phonics
Through the teaching of effective phonics at St Paul’s we want our children to become confident and fluent readers as well as supporting them in developing a love of reading. Giving children the best possible phonics teaching enables them to grow into efficient readers and opens the doors to all learning. The more children can read the more they learn and want to learn.
At St Paul’s, we believe that all our children can become fluent readers and writers. This is why we teach reading through Little Wandle Letters and Sounds Revised, which is a systematic and synthetic phonics programme. We start teaching phonics in our Nursery class and follow the Little Wandle Letters and Sounds Revised progression, which ensures children build on their growing knowledge of the alphabetic code, mastering phonics to read and spell as they move through school.
Foundation for Phonics
Foundations for Phonics develops children’s phonological and phonemic awareness through fun, engaging games and nursery rhymes.
Developing these skills in Nursery lays the best possible foundations for learning phonics in Reception. There are two aspects to Foundations for Phonics: Rhyme time and Tuning into sounds. Rhyme time explores rhyme to build up a bank of shared language, develops children’s understanding of the world and develops familiarity with the sounds in words. Tuning into sounds teaches phonological and phonemic awareness through games.
Early reading and phonics (Learning to read)
The Rose Report (2006) emphasises high-quality phonics as a fundamental part of the decoding skills required by children when learning to read.
At St Paul’s, by having fidelity to the Little Wandle Letters and Sounds Revised scheme, we have a consistent, high-quality approach to the teaching of phonics across the Early Years Foundation Stage, Key Stage One and into Key Stage Two for children who still need further support. This ensures that our teaching includes the seven features of effective phonics practice:
• direct teaching in frequent, short bursts
• consistency of approach
• secure, systematic progression in phonics learning
• maintaining pace of learning
• providing repeated practice
• application of phonics using matched decodable books
• early identification of children at risk of falling behind, linked to the provision of effective keep-up support.
Secure, systematic progression in phonics learning
The Little Wandle scheme ensures that our Phonic's curriculum has a clear progression in phonics learning and covers:
• all the phonemes of English words
• correct pronunciation of the phonemes
• all commonly occurring grapheme-phoneme correspondences (GPCs)
• the correct formation of all graphemes
• blending for reading
• segmenting for writing
• the sequenced learning of appropriate tricky words
Phase | Phonic Knowledge and Skills |
Phase One | 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 | 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 | 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 | 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 | 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. |
Reading practice sessions: the application of phonics using matched decodable books
We teach children to read through reading practice sessions three times a week. To be effective, it is essential that children only read decodable books which are exactly matched to the phonics progression of the programme used; present only words made up of GPCs learned to that point; include tricky words only as they are introduced in the programme and are used exclusively when children are practising reading and not mixed in with books that are not fully decodable at the child’s level. Each practice session is taught by a fully trained adult to small groups of approximately six children. The groups are monitored by the class teacher and phonics lead, who rotates and works with each group regularly. Each reading practice session has a clear focus, so that the demands of the session do not overload the children’s working memory.
The reading practice sessions have been designed to focus on three key reading skills and early comprehension skills:
- decoding
- prosody: teaching children to read with understanding and expression
- comprehension: teaching children to understand the text