Beech Street Community Primary School

Phonics

It is essential that our approach to teaching phonics and reading is accessible to all learners, regardless of background.

Intent

At Beech Street we believe that all our children can become fluent readers and writers. This is why we teach reading through Little Wandle Letters and Sounds Revised, which is a systematic and synthetic phonics programme.

We start teaching phonics in Reception and follow the Little Wandle Letters and Sounds Revised progression, which ensures children build on their growing knowledge of the alphabetic code, mastering phonics to read and spell as they move through school.

We also model the application of the alphabetic code through phonics in shared reading and writing, both inside and outside of the phonics lesson and across the curriculum. We 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.

We also make phonics an intrinsic part of our "Five a Day" commitment to reading 5 stories a day to our children in EYFS and Year 1, deliberately choosing books that explore sounds, rhymes, poetry or alliteration.

Implementation of the different phases of phonics

The table below shows the progression in phonics through Reception. It details the graphemes that will be taught in each term, alongside the tricky words (tricky words are words that can’t be blended.) The tables at the right show the progression in Year 1.

What will my child do when they are in Nursery?

In Nursery we teach the foundations for phonics:

We provide a balance of child-led and adult-led experiences for all children that meet the curriculum expectations for ‘Communication and language’ and ‘Literacy’. These include:

- sharing high-quality stories and poems

- learning a range of nursery rhymes and action rhymes

- activities that develop focused listening and attention, including oral blending

- attention to high-quality language.

We ensure Nursery children are well prepared to begin learning grapheme-phoneme correspondences (GPCs) and blending in Reception.

Aims

Through phonics we aim to build children's speaking and listening skills as well as to prepare children for learning to read by developing their phonic knowledge and skills with the aim of them becoming fluent readers by age seven. The children’s learning includes developing letter and sound recognition, word building and word recognition as part of their phonic, spelling and handwriting development. During the lessons we also teach children to have phonemic awareness, aural discrimination of sounds and rhyme awareness when reading, writing and spelling.

How to support your child at home:

Parents can access a parents page on the Little Wandle website:

https://www.littlewandlelettersandsounds.org.uk/resources/for-parents/

Here you can download resources and watch helpful videos which will show parents how children are taught to pronounce the different phonemes.

Phonic Screening Check

At the end of year one, all the children take a compulsory phonic screening check. Click the image to the right for a video to hear about what the check involves and what it means for your child.