Phonics
At Red Rose Primary School, we use Letters and Sounds to teach phonics. This programme sets out a detailed and systematic programme for teaching phonics skills to children with the aim of them becoming fluent readers by the age of seven. It aims to build children’s speaking and listening skills in their own right as well as to prepare for learning to read by developing their phonic knowledge and skills.
Synthetic Phonics is the synthesizing, or blending of phonemes (sounds) to make a word, enabling children to read. Synthetic phonics is all the different ways each phoneme can be represented. Children are taught how to:
- blend phonemes in a word to read
- listen for phonemes in words to spell
- Irregular, high frequency words
- say the phoneme first and then the letter name
There are 6 overlapping phases. Below is a summary of the phases taught.
| Phase | Phonics Knowledge and Skills |
|---|---|
| 1 | 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. |
| 2 | 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. |
| 3 | 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. |
| 4 | 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. |
| 5 | Now we move on to the “complex code”. Children learn more graphemes for the phonemes which they already know, plus different ways of pronouncing phonemes they already know. |
| 6 | Working on spelling, including prefixes and suffixes, doubling and dropping letters etc. |
Here are some more resources and details about each of the different phases.
[faq-concertina category=”phonics”]
Useful Links and Documents
Y1 and Y2 Common Exception Words
First 100 High Frequency Words
Phonics Play – Phonics Resources and Games
Teach Your Monster To Read – Online Phonics / Reading Journey