Phonics

At Leighton we use the DFES document ‘Letters and Sounds’ alongside ‘Jolly Phonics’ action rhymes to aid the teaching of Phonics. Phonics is the correspondence between spoken sound (phoneme) and the written letter (grapheme). ‘Letters and Sounds’ is a systematic phonics programme that aims to build children's speaking and listening skills in their own right, as well as, preparing children to learn to read and become fluent readers. Phonics is taught in six Phases where new letters and sounds are learnt alongside ‘tricky troll’ words through a range of multi-sensory teaching and learning experiences.

Teaching of Phonics in Year One takes place daily and leads into our adult led teaching and the children’s busy learning which enables them to apply their learning. Each session is 20 minutes long and follows the revisit, teach, practice, apply sequence. Children are grouped according to their individual needs throughout Year One to ensure that they are challenged and learning at their own pace. These groups are fluid and assessed at regular intervals to ensure teaching matches the needs of the children.

Recap Phase 3

In this phase the children learn the remaining single letter sounds (Phonemes) and the sounds comprising of 2 or 3 letters (Digraphs and Tri-graphs) By the end of this phase children should be confident when reading and spelling decodable words. Children will also be practising reading and writing captions, as well as continuing to learn some more ‘Tricky troll’ and high frequency words.

Set 6: j v w x he she by down for from

Set 7: y z, zz qu me we I’m love made now

ch sh th/th ng be you old see that them

ai ee igh oa all are then this too with

oo/oo ar or ur her was

ow oi ear they my

air ure er

Phase 4

In Phase 4 children are not taught any new phonemes or graphemes. Instead, they are taught to further manipulate the phonemes and graphemes they have already learnt. Many of the words children explored in Phase 2 and 3 were monosyllabic (words of one syllable). In Phase 4 children explore more polysyllabic words (words containing more than one syllable). Many of the words in Phase 2 and 3 required children to blend approximately three sounds together in order to read them. Phase 4 requires children to blend an increasing number of sounds together in order to read.