Aims:
- For all children to have a secure understanding of Phonics Phases 1-6.
- For all children to be able to successfully apply phonological knowledge to reading and spelling.
Teaching and Learning
At St Nicholas, Phonics is taught from Early years and throughout KS1 and KS2 (if needed). Teachers follow ‘Phonics Play’ scheme which fully covers the DfE ‘Letters and Sounds’ curriculum.
There are three main areas to the Phonics Curriculum:
- GPC’s (Grapheme Phoneme Correspondences) – being taught all the phonemes (sounds) in the English language and ways of writing them down. These are taught in a particular order.
- Blending – when a child can say the sounds that make up a word and merge each sound together so they can hear what the word is.
- Segmenting – the opposite of blending, where a child is able to say a word and break it up into its individual phonemes.
Phonics teaching at St Nicholas follows this structure:
- Revise, activate prior knowledge and revisit previous learning.
- Teach, introduce new concepts, explain, investigate and model.
- Practice, extend/explore independently. Investigate and generalise.
- Apply and assess, explain and demonstrate understanding through independent application.
Tricky words (High Frequency) are taught through different spelling activities and repeated exposure to the children. Phonics is also referred to across the whole curriculum so that children are exposed to the sounds regularly. They are encouraged to use their phonological knowledge where possible to decode unfamiliar words