In Nursery, Reception, year 1 and year 2 children are taught phonics in a daily 15 minute session. The “Letters and Sounds” programme is used, see below for a more detailed plan.
| Phase | Phonic Knowledge and Skills |
| Phase One (Nursery/Reception) | 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 (Reception) | 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 (Reception) | 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 (Reception) | No new grapheme-phoneme correspondences are taught in this phase. Children learn to blend and segent longer words with adjacet consonants, e.g. swim, clap, jump. |
| Phase Five (Throughout Year 1) | 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 Six (Throughout Year 2 and beyond) | Working on spelling, including prefixes and suffixes, doubling and dropping letters etc. |
We regularly assess and track each child’s phonic ability across school. Within Key Stage 2 individual children who require phonic work are able to access this approach within their normal Literacy sessions.
Children in KS1 and Lower KS2 primarily use the Oxford Reading Tree scheme of books but within each class there is a mini Library where books both fiction and non-fiction can be accessed.
We also use the Lexia Reading programme with every child in school. This is a personalised reading programme which tracks each child’s reading progress. Class teachers are able to pinpoint any gaps in a child’s knowledge and allocate additional practice. Children access Lexia for 30 minutes 3 times per week.
