Phonics

INTENT   What are our aims?

At Pomphlett, we endeavour to teach children to read effectively using Essential Letters and Sounds: Phonics which includes teaching synthetic phonics, sight vocabulary, decoding and encoding words as well as spelling and accurate letter formation.

 ‘Essential Letters and Sounds’ outlines six phonic phases, each with new phonemes to be learnt, increasing with difficulty as children progress from phase one to six.

Teaching children to read and write independently, as quickly as possible, is one of the core purposes in Early Years and Key Stage 1. These fundamental skills not only hold the keys to the rest of the curriculum but also have a huge impact on children’s self-esteem and future life chances.

Throughout Early Years Foundation Stage and Key Stage One, children are taught in small and focused groups to target their specific needs for Phonics, alongside children of the same ability.

Phonics is taught Monday - Thursday where we focus on teaching children to:

• read fluently and with good understanding
• develop the habit of reading widely and often, for both pleasure and information
• write clearly, accurately and coherently, adapting their language and style in and for a range of contexts, purposes and audiences

IMPLEMENTATION   Phonics in our curriculum

As reading and writing is an essential life skill, we are dedicated to enabling our children to become enthused, engaged and successful readers and writers.

To support this we:

• Teach daily phonics sessions, where the children learn new phonemes, improve their ability to segment and blend sounds, and their ability to apply this knowledge into their reading and writing.
• Read to the whole class using quality texts so that children can demonstrate their understanding and thinking, which in turn, inspires creativity when writing.
• Ensure that all classes are equipped with a wide range of reading books to meet the needs of all children in the class and engage, challenge and motivate all children.
• Issue all children from Foundation to Year 6 with a reading book that is appropriate for their reading ability
• Teach targeted reading sessions in both guided groups and through whole class teaching

Our reading policy sets the expectation that all children should to read at least three times a week at home to support fluency and understanding and promote parents’ partnership in their children’s learning.

IMPACT - How we check progress and ensure reading success

Each term, in Key Stage 1, we assess children to ensure that all children are confident before moving onto a new phonics phase.

We make sure that pupils read books that are closely matched to their increasing knowledge of phonics and ability to read ‘tricky words’ so that they experience early reading success and gain confidence in their reading.

Throughout the teaching of Phonics, we are able to measure attainment using the Key Stage One and Key Stage Two national assessments, along with the information provided by the Phonics Screening check in Year One. If children are identified as needing further support, then this is given through carefully planned intervention.

Early phonics teaching in the Foundation Stage and Key Stage one is built upon in Key Stage Two where children’s knowledge is broadened through further vocabulary extension and understanding of broader and more complex letter patterns

Reading is embedded in all areas of the curriculum to ensure that all children leave school as competent readers who have developed a love of books and a critical appreciation of them.

Year 1 Phonics Screening Check

In the summer term of Year 1, the children complete a statutory phonics screening check to confirm whether individual pupils have learnt phonic decoding to an appropriate standard.

The screening comprises a list of 40 real and nonsense-words (pseudo words), which your child read one-to-one with a teacher. Pseudo words allow the assessment to focus purely on decoding phonic knowledge.  As pseudo-words are new to all children, they do not favour those with a good vocabulary knowledge or large sight word memory. The words in the screening incorporate phonics skills acquired by the children in Year One.

If children fail to meet the required standard at the end of Year 1 they will repeat in the summer term of Year 2. Class based interventions will be in place to support children in acquiring these skills.