Intent

At St Joseph’s RC 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. Through phonics children learn to segment words to support their spelling ability and blend sounds to read words. The effective teaching of systematic synthetic phonics is of high priority from Nursery to the end of Year 2.

Implementation

At St Joseph’s RC Primary School, we use the Department of Education validated scheme Essential Letters and Sounds. This allows our phonics teaching and learning to be progressive from our mixed Early Years Nursery and Reception class up to Year 2. Children from the age of two years old work on Phase One phonics, which concentrates on developing their speaking and listening skills and lays the foundations for the phonic work which starts in Phase 2.

As children move into Reception they continue to build on their listening skills and are introduced to Phase 2 which marks the start of systematic phonics work. They have discrete, daily phonics sessions where they revise previous learning, are taught new graphemes/phonemes and practise together and apply what they have learnt. Through Essential Letters and Sounds, the children are taught the appropriate grapheme-phoneme correspondences GPC’s that make up all the sounds required for reading and spelling. These phonemes include those made by just one letter and those that are made by two or more. Children work through the different phases and as they grow in confidence and experience, they are introduced to alternative ways of representing the same sound.

It is vital that whilst children are learning to read, they read books that match their phonics knowledge. Therefore, our selection of books are carefully structures for our pupils. The Oxford University Press decodable readers support Essential Letters and Sounds and have been incorporated into our already existing selection of books. These books are intended to be used during the Review lesson on Day 5 of each week and as home readers. They are also recommended for use in other reading sessions to give children plenty of opportunities to develop their phonic knowledge and reading fluency. Children keep the books for one week and re-read them at least four times in this period, so it’s important to communicate this to parents to ensure their support. Re-reading ensures that children develop their reading skills and fluency. This, in turn, supports their learning in school; as children become more fluent at reading, they are able to focus on their new learning

Impact

Through the teaching of systematic phonics, our aim is for children to become fluent readers by the end of Key Stage 1. Children can then focus on developing fluency and comprehension throughout the school. Attainment in phonics is measured by the Phonics Screening Test at the end of Year 1.