Phonics at PEPA

Changes to phonics 2021

In April 2021, the government published the revised core criteria for effective systematic synthetic phonics teaching programmes and launched a new process to validate complete systematic synthetic phonics teaching programmes.

This process is for both previously assessed programmes and new applicants. By ensuring high-quality phonics teaching the government wants to improve literacy levels to:

• give all children a solid base upon which to build as they progress through school

• help children to develop the habit of reading widely and often, for both pleasure and information

Phonics International

With the new government announcement, this year, our school has started a new phonics scheme, ‘Phonics International’ which has been designed by Debbie Hepplewhite.

Phonics international website-

https://phonicsinternational.com/

What is phonics international?

Focuses on - The Synthetic Phonics Teaching Principles

Teach: KNOWLEDGE of the ALPHABETIC CODE

= letters linked to the sounds of speech

THREE CORE SKILLS

1. ‘sounding out and blending’ for reading

2. identifying sounds in words for spelling

3. Handwriting

What is Synthetic Phonics Teaching?

Synthetic phonics, also known as blended phonics or inductive phonics, is a method of teaching English reading which first teaches the letter sounds and then builds up to blending these sounds together to achieve full pronunciation of whole words.

Why is it ‘synthetic’ phonics?

Synthesising = sounding out and blending to read the unknown words

What role does the alphabet play?

1) bank of letter shapes

2) alphabetical order relayed

by letter names (ay, bee, see)

3) the capital letters are

the same code for speech

sounds as the lower case letters (/a/ /b/ /k/)

The alphabetic code (letter sounds)

We don’t use letter names

to teach reading or spelling!

We use letter sounds.

We teach letter sounds using pure sounds.

What are pure sounds in phonics?

Pronouncing each letter sound clearly and distinctly without adding additional sounds to the end e.g. 'f' not 'fuh.

When supporting your child/ children with their phonics at home, it is really important that you are also using pure sounds. If you watch the video, on the link below, listen to how they say the sounds, these are pure sounds, which are taught at school.

This video is really useful to gain an understanding of how we teach synthetic phonics as well as the pronunciation of the alphabetic code using ‘pure sounds’.

Sounds of the English Phonic Code -Synthetic Phonics.wmv

Phonics screening-

The Phonics Screening Check is a test for children in Year 1 and children in Year 2 that have not yet passed this in Year 1. Children take it during June in a one-to-one setting with a teacher. This is usually their class teacher, but it could also be the headteacher or another teacher who knows the child well.

Whilst children learn phonics to help them with both word reading and spelling, the Phonics Screening Check only tests their skills at word reading. This is sometimes called decoding.

During the Phonics Screening Check, children are asked to read (decode) 40 words. Most of these words are real words but some are pseudo-words. Pseudo-words are included to ensure that children are using their decoding skills and not just relying on their memory of words they’ve read before. Because some children may misread these pseudo-words based on their similarity to words in their existing vocabulary, each pseudo-word is clearly identified with an image of an alien. Most teachers and children, therefore, refer to pseudo-words as alien words. The children would normally need to read 32 words accurately to successfully pass the screening check.

Please click on the government link below, this website has a range of practice papers from previous years phonics screening tests. These can be used at home with your child to practice for the phonics screening test.

https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/phonics-screening-check-2019-materials

We set children up for

lifelong reading and spelling when we teach phonics rigorously and comprehensively.