Phonics
Phonics is the reading and spelling of words using prior knowledge of the sounds letters make.
It helps us to make sense of the wide ranging letter combinations and spelling patterns we have in the English language and learn them is a systematic order using a cumulative and rigorous approach.
At St Margarets at Hasbury CE Primary School we have adopted Sound Start Phonics. This is an SSP programme that meets the DfE requirements. The curriculum is systematic, rigorous, and includes fully decodable books. Alongside this, all staff have received comprehensive teacher training empowering them to teach phonics effectively The implementation of the Letters and Sounds programme has ensured teachers have carefully matched their resources - the letters and words children are asked to read during and beyond lessons. We ensure we keep a track of the GPCs (grapheme-phoneme correspondences) children have been taught and the blending and segmenting strategies they are able to use for word-reading and spelling. Consistency is key. Children need to recognise letters and words in a wide range of contexts and presenting them in the same format.
Phonics lessons are taught at the start of every day in Reception, Year 1 and Year 2. The lessons follow a very structured approach to ensure an appropriate amount of revision, rehearsal, new learning, practice and application of knowledge takes place.
From the beginning of the Reception year, or sooner if appropriate, children are taught to recognise individual letters by speaking the corresponding sounds they make in words. We refer to these as GPCs which stands for Grapheme Phoneme Correspondences, these are rehearsed daily and applied to read and spell words.
As children progress through the phonics programme they take home copies of the GPCs they have been taught along with coloured sets of words so that they can apply their knowledge to read words.
Throughout Reception and beginning of Year 1 children continue on to learn more complex GPCs and apply this knowledge to read and write a range of words. Please refer to our Overview for more detail.
Reading
Writing
Similarly, when we are spelling/writing words, we need to know which graphemes/letter combinations represent the phonemes/sounds we can hear in the word we want to write.
For example, if we need to write the word ‘top,’ we need to segment it into the smaller units of sound within it. We teach our children to do this confidently and rehearse it verbally with lots of words every week. We say, ‘the word is top – segment, t-o-p.’
For many words children have to choose which grapheme/letter combination is the correct representation of a phoneme/sound.
For example to write the word ‘concrete’ we need to segment it into spoken sounds. ‘c-o-n-c-r-ee-t.’ We need to select the correct version of ee. If it’s not a word we know then we can ‘ask the question.’ ‘Is it ‘ee as in tree, ea as in beach, e-e as in athlete, etc.
Tricky Words and Common Exception Words
Phonic knowledge cannot be successfully applied to decode all words. There are many words that may contain a ‘tricky’ part and so not all of the sounds ‘work.’ We refer to these as tricky words and teach children to decode these by acknowledging the tricky part, sounding and blending the other phonemes and ultimately have instant recognition of the word.
We also put very common words under regular review and refer to these as 'on the go' words. During the phonics lesson children are given 4-6 words per week to rehearse with the aim of having instant recognition of these by Friday.
