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Phonics
Phonics
Letters and Sounds is a phonics resource published by the Department for Education and Skills in 2007. It aims to build children's speaking and listening skills in their own right as well as to prepare children for learning to read by developing their phonic knowledge and skills. It sets out a detailed and systematic programme for teaching phonic skills for children starting by the age of five, with the aim of them becoming fluent readers by age seven.
At Brookfields we follow ‘Letters and Sounds’ for the teaching of phonics. We start the programme in week 2 (recapping on phase 1 and 2) of EYFS and it runs right through until the end of KS1. The pupils are grouped according to the phase they are working in and this is then linked with their reading. We assess and track the pupils progress in phonics using ‘phonic tracker’ – this helps us baseline and monitor progress throughout the academic year. Your child's class teacher will keep you informed of your child's progress.
Structure of our lessons:
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Revisit |
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Activate prior knowledge. Revisit previous linked learning. |
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Teach |
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Introduce the new concept. Explain Investigate Model |
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Practise |
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Individual/group work Extend/explore the concept independently Investigate Generate |
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Apply and Assess |
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Assess through independent application Explain and demonstrate understanding |
If you would like to see a phonics lesson in action, check out the DFE home and school learning on youtube.
Link: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCP_FbjYUP_UtldV2K_-niWw
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Phase 1 (Nursery/Reception)
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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.
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Phase 2 (Reception) up to 6 weeks
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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.
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Phase 3 (Reception) up to 12 weeks
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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.
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Phase 4 (Reception) 4 to 6 weeks
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No new grapheme-phoneme correspondences are taught in this phase. Children learn to blend and segent longer words with adjacet consonants, e.g. swim, clap, jump.
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Phase 5 (Throughout Year 1)
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Now we move on to the "complex code". Children learn more graphemes for the phonemes which they already know, plus different ways of pronouncing the graphemes they already know.
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Phase 6 (Throughout Year 2 and beyond)
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Working on spelling, including prefixes and suffixes, doubling and dropping letters etc.
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