Phonics
Phonics at Scarning
At Scarning Primary School we follow the DfE validated scheme Supersonic Phonic Friends in Reception and Key stage 1. Supersonic Phonic Friends is an enchanted adventure of phonics where children will meet several friendly woodland characters along the way who represent each literacy skill involved. Supported by the children's new 'Supersonic phonics friends' and rhyming captions and phrases, this approach ensure children develop confidence and apply each skill to their own reading and writing.
With 'Supersonic Phonic Friends', we 'wrap our children' in rhyme' to ensure they 'hear the sounds in the words they speak'.
Our intent is for every child to become a reader and for early readers to have the skills to decode words to enable them to read fluently. We want children to have an understanding of what they have read and be able to ask suitable questions, responding enthusiastically and showing curiosity. We believe that all children should be motivated to read and want to read for pleasure. We also want to give our children the skills to become independent writers, learning to segment to spell words and apply spelling rules. We also have a strong focus on language development for our children because we know that speaking and listening are crucial skills for reading and writing in all subjects.
Phonics is an integral part of the reading and writing curriculum in EYFS and Key stage 1 and we deliver consistent and engaging lessons through Supersonic phonics friends. In year 2 children are taught spelling rules using Suze’s super spelling rules as part of the Supersonic Phonics friends programme. Intervention for children who do not pass the screening check happens three times a week and this continues into key stage 2 for children who need it. All children are then taught spellings through the Spelling shed programme in key stage 2. In the Spelling Shed lessons, children continue to build on the firm foundations built whilst studying phonics. They will continue to break down spellings into the smallest units of sound and cluster them into syllables in order to read and write words efficiently.
Phonics Reading Books: We have invested in a brand new reading scheme full of engaging, new and up to date books that your child will be using to learn to read. Our new book scheme from Oxford Reading Tree is called, “Word Sparks”. It is written by teachers who have vast experience and knowledge around the teaching of phonics and reading and we feel the new scheme will enrich the provision of reading at Scarning and support early reading. We will be supplementing them with other high quality phonics books. All our reading books in reception and year 1 are completely decodable which enables us to fulfil the requirement from the DFE and Ofsted for early reading; which is that, every child is reading a “fully decodable book that is in line with their phonics teaching”.
Overview of Phonics at Scarning Primary
Firm Foundations in Phonics is the initial phase where young learners develop the knowledge, skills and understanding to discriminate between and use auditory, environmental and instrumental sounds. Aligned with phase 1 of Letters and Sounds, children are introduced to this phase in their Nursery/pre-school and it runs throughout reception alongside the new learning. In reception, children work within Basics 2-4. Here learners are introduced to phonemes/sounds and graphemes/letters systematically. They also learn to develop and apply blending and segmenting skills for reading and writing.
Within KS1, children work through the stages 'Choose to Use' and 'Switch it Spell' and then move onto 'Suze's super spelling rules' where the National Curriculum spelling expectations are taught. In year 1 the children continue to apply their phonics knowledge and skills as the prime approach to reading and spelling. It focuses on phonetically decodable two-syllable and three-syllable words and the alternative ways of pronouncing and representing the long vowel phonemes. Furthermore, children will develop their ability to attempt to read and spell increasingly complex words. In year 2, the children explore further spelling patterns and grammar while also developing a breadth of knowledge, skills and understanding in the recognition and spelling of common exception words.
The phonics programme intends to not only provide children with opportunities to develop the knowledge, skills and understanding essential for reading and writing, but also, to develop each child’s confidence, resilience and engagement in phonics lessons and a love for reading and writing.
Our phonics lessons ensure the teaching of phonics follows a 4 part lesson model of revise, teach, practise and apply. The lessons (daily 25 minute lessons) enable all learners to develop and apply new skills. The application of the skills are supported through English lessons, individual and guided reading and whole class reading. In Reception children are also provided lots of opportunities to further apply these skills within fun and engaging activities through continuous provision. Phonics lessons allow children to apply and practise phonics skills and challenge learners.
We follow a whole class teaching approach to start with in reception, where all children are exposed to the relevant expectations set out for their year. Children who are identified as not making adequate progress receive intervention based on their needs. This could take the form of pre-teach and post teach or extra booster lessons to help them to keep up or catch up. Later in the year, from Easter, we stream the children into two or three ability sets, which continues into key stage 1.
Firm Foundations in Phonics (Basics 1)
(taught in nurseries/pre-schools and Reception)
Firm Foundations of phonics aligns with Phase one of ‘Letters and Sounds’ and concentrates on developing children's speaking and listening skills. It lays the foundations for the phonic work which starts in basics 2. The emphasis during this phase is to get children attuned to the sounds around them and ready to begin developing oral blending and segmenting skills. Phase 1 is divided into seven aspects.
Each aspect contains three strands:
· Tuning in to sounds (auditory discrimination)
· Listening and remembering sounds (auditory memory and sequencing)
· Talking about sounds (developing vocabulary and language comprehension)
Singing nursery rhymes, exploring books with rhyming words and alliteration are really important pre-reading skills. Orally blending words is so useful for children to practise blending without having to worry about the letters at the same time.
Basics 2 (taught in Reception)
In basics 2, letters and their sounds (spellings) are introduced one at a time. A set of 4 graphemes (spellings) are taught each week.
The children will begin to learn to blend and segment to help begin reading and spelling. This will begin with simple words.
Basics 3 (taught in Reception)
By the time children reach Basics 3, they will already be able to blend and segment words containing the 19 letters taught in Basics 2. Twenty-six new graphemes (spellings) are introduced (one at a time) and new tricky words.
Basics 4 (taught in Reception and Year 1)
By Basics 4, children will be able to represent each of 44 phonemes with a grapheme (spelling). They will be able to blend phonemes to read CVC words and segment CVC words for spelling. In basics 4 we focus on reading CVCC and CVCC words (words with 4 phonemes in) and then will move onto CCVCC words. They will also be learning to read simple two syllable words. Children will learn their tricky words with Tess and read nonsense words with Nan. This phase consolidates all that the children have learnt in the previous phases.
Choose to use (alternatives spellings) and Switch it spell (alternative pronunciations)
(taught in year 1)
The Higher Levels teaches children the concept that there are more than one spelling for a sound that they can hear in a word. With the help of Choose to Use Suze, they will find out all about 'sounds the same but looks different' and cool and not so cool choose to use spelling rules for up to 85 spellings for the 44 sounds of the English Language.
With the help of Switch it Mitch, they will also find out all about 'looks the same, sounds different' and switch it spelling sounds where one spelling can make up to 2 different sounds in words.
At the end of this phase children will be able to choose to use 85 spellings of the 44 sounds in the English Language. They will also be able to switch spellings and sounds for alternative pronunciations. They will be able to read decodeable texts with The Basics and the Higher Levels of Phonics spellings including adjacent consonants and make more accurate attempts in their further stages of spelling in their writing journey.
How do we say the sounds?
It is important that we say the pure sounds without adding the 'uh' to it. These videos below demonstrate the correct pronunciation.
Meet the Characters
Cheeky Sneaky Sid
Sid is funny, cute and sneaky… not to mention a little bit cheeky!
Jazzy Jack and Magic Mack
Jack and Mack help us to hear more than 3 sounds in a word, they bring the sound to life so it can be heard.
Listening Len and See it Sam
Listening Len helps us hear the sounds in the words that we speak and See it Sam helps us see and remember the spellings each and every week.
Seb, Bill and Ben
Meet the three musketeers, Segmenting Seb, Building Bill and Blending Ben, who help you pick up a book and a pen!
The twins – Rex and Ron
Introducing our twins Reading Rex and Writing Ron who are so bright. These guys help us to read and write!
Suze and Mitch
Choose to use Suze and switch it to Mitch are so very cool, they help us switch the spell sound and the choose to use rule!
Tricky Tess and Nonsense Nan
Let us introduce you to Nan and Tess, they help us read those silly words which make no sense and make reading the tricky words fun and immense!
A weekly parents newsletter will be emailed detailing what has been covered in your child's phonics lesson that week.
Phonics at home
Tips for teaching your child the sounds:
It is important for a child to learn lower case or small letters rather than capital letters at first. Most early books and games use lower case
letters and your child will learn these first at school. Obviously you should use a capital letter when required, such as at the beginning of the child's name, eg. Paul.
When you talk about letters to your child, remember to use the letter sounds rather than the alphabet names of the letters. The reason for this is that sounding out words is practically impossible if you use the alphabet names. eg. cat, would sound like: see ay tee
When saying the sounds we don’t say it with ‘uh’ sound at the end, e.g. s is not s-uh but ssss.
Useful webpages
https://www.phonicsbloom.com
https://www.bbc.co.uk/cbeebies/shows/alphablocks
Useful Apps
Teach your Monster to read
Hairy phonics
Phonics play
Phonics Glossary of terms
The Terminology
Phoneme
A phoneme is the smallest unit of sound in a word (the way we say a sound). It is generally accepted that most varieties of spoken English use about 44 phonemes.
Graphemes
A grapheme is a symbol of a phoneme (the way it is written). It is a letter or group of letters representing a sound.
Segmenting and blending
Segmenting consists of breaking words down into phonemes to spell (we talk about chopping up the words with our robot arms). Blending consists of building words from phonemes to read by squashing the sounds together. Both skills are important.
Digraph
This is when two letters come together to make a phoneme. For example, /oa/ makes the sound in ‘boat’ and is also known as a vowel digraph. There are also consonant digraphs, for example, /sh/ and /ch/.
Trigraph
This is when three letters come together to make one phoneme, for example /igh/.
Split digraph
A digraph in which the two letters are not adjacent – e.g. make (taught in year 1)
Abbreviations
VC, CVC, and CCVC are the respective abbreviations for vowel-consonant, consonant-vowel-consonant, consonant-consonant-vowel-consonant, and are used to describe the order of graphemes in words (e.g. am (VC), Sam (CVC), slam (CCVC), or each (VC), beach (CVC), bleach (CCVC).
Tricky words
There are some words which don’t follow the usual rule and cannot be blended or segmented e.g. the. These words just have to be learned by sight. The children have a these words on a key ring to practice at home.
High Frequency words
These are words which are commonly used and is helpful if children learn to recognise them by sight and to spell them without having to sound them out, such as and, said, get.
