Phonics
Teaching children to read is an essential part of their learning. Reading is a skill that helps to develop vocabulary and improve understanding of words. In synthetic phonics lessons, children learn the relationship between letters and sounds. Teaching them to recognise the sounds each letter makes and how to put them together, enables them to read and spell.
Our Aims:
- To establish a cohesive whole-school approach with progression and continuity in the teaching and learning of phonics throughout the school with a focus on quality first teaching.
- To ensure that systematic synthetic phonics (following the Twinkl Phonics programme) is the first approach pupils use to help with their reading and spelling.
- To ensure children learn to read and write all 44 graphemes in the English language.
- To ensure children have specific strategies to identify common exception words (tricky words).
- To have robust assessment procedures to check progress and identify pupils in need of intervention.
- For pupils to apply their phonic knowledge in their reading and writing across the whole curriculum.
- For pupils to develop a love of reading and enjoy reading for pleasure confidently across a range of genres.
Objectives:
- To provide consistent, high-quality phonics teaching that ensures all children have a strong foundation upon which to tackle the complex processes of reading and writing.
- To ensure that the teaching of synthetic phonics is systematic and progressive throughout the foundation stage, key stage one and key stage two (for those children needing interventions) to support phonetic knowledge and understanding.
- To ensure that children have strong phonetic knowledge, understanding and skills so that they can decode words confidently and engage with higher order reading and writing skills.
We use Twinkl Phonics as our systematic, synthetic phonics programme (SSP). It is high quality and robust in its purpose. With a clear, structured progression through the programme, it allows our pupils to meet or exceed the expected standard.
The Twinkl Phonics approach combines rigorous progression with engaging learning materials. We believe that children learn best when they are enjoying their learning and that this comes from a mix of bright, fun and engaging lesson resources, within a clear and systematic approach that builds on children’s skills daily.
Every Twinkl Phonics lesson follows a five-part structure to ensure that the four cornerstones of phonics are covered. During our phonics lessons, children will repeat the elements from the four cornerstones of phonics to ensure that they have rapid and automatic recall of GPCs and tricky/common exception words. Each day, they will experience blending and segmenting activities to allow regular practice of these core skills.
Stories are used to provide a stimulus and context for phonics teaching in our Twinkl Phonics lessons. The story content also integrates games to practise the skills taught. Our phonics lessons are also supported by weekly decodable minibooks, which are part of our core provision, where children can apply the skills they have learnt in their phonics lessons. As part of our wider SSP provision, there are also follow-up activities that the children can complete independently, in pairs or in groups that relate to the day’s learning.
In addition, we use actions to help the children remember phonemes; this kinaesthetic, visual and auditory approach helps the children to retain the phonemes and supports children with SEND. Decodable reading books are also provided, matched to the children’s phonic level using Rhino Readers. We use both individual and group reading to teach reading alongside phonics. We also use a mix of eBooks and physical books.
In conjunction with the teaching of phonics, we also give our children phonics-based activities to take home at the appropriate level. These include parent information sheets and spelling bookmarks. This helps to consolidate what has been taught in school and encourages a cohesive whole-school approach.