Phonics
Phonics
Intent
At Lower Farm we are passionate about ensuring all children become confident and enthusiastic readers and writers. We believe that phonics provides the foundations of learning to make the development into fluent reading and writing easier. Through phonics, children learn to segment words to support their spelling ability and blend sounds to read words. The teaching of phonics is of high priority.
Implementation
At Lower Farm, we follow the newly accredited Essential Letters and Sounds to ensure consistent high quality phonics. For more information, please follow this link: https://global.oup.com/education/content/primary/series/essential-letters-and-sounds/?region=uk
We start by teaching phonics in Nursery, building knowledge and skills in Reception and Key stage 1.
The Lower Farm ethos is 'KEEP UP not CATCH UP'
Please click here for an introduction to Essential Letters and Sounds video
Nursery Phonics
It is expected that Nursery will introduce Phase 1 phonics through small focused groups and activities. This includes learning to make different sounds and developing listening skill. The key is developing vocabulary, language composition with the early introduction of graphemes (letters) and phonemes (sounds) When appropriate, the practitioners will then introduce the initial sounds and may begin to teach digraphs.
Reception Phonics
In Reception, we will revise all letters and sounds and learn new digraphs and trigraphs. At this stage the children are also becoming more confident with segmenting and blending sounds to read whole words. In Reception, children are also taught words with 4 and 5 sounds in them and alternate ways to read and write different sounds. Assessments take place every 5 weeks to ensure pupils are retaining their learning and building fluency and automaticity (automatic reading skills) to ensure confident readers.
We teach phonics daily and phonics is part of our continuous provision all day, daily.
Children also take a book from our phonics book collection to practice reading at home.
The general rule is that children read this book 3 times in order to develop fluency and then they change their book. The book is directly linked to the sound that they are learning that week.
Please watch the video below for an example of a phonics session in a Reception class.
EYFS Phonics lesson.mp4Year 1 and Year 2 Phonics
The same approach as Reception continues into Year 1 and 2 to offer a consistent approach. The children learn to read and write a range of graphemes and alternate graphemes. Alongside this, the children are taught the ‘Harder to read and spell’ words. These are words which do not follow the regular phonetic pattern and are an exception to the phonetic code.
Phonics and reading activities are taught in whole class and the discreet phonic sessions take place daily for 15 - 20 minutes daily.
Like in reception, Children also take a book from our phonics book collection to practice reading at home. The general rule is that children read this book 3 times in order to develop fluency and then they change their book. The book is directly linked to the sound that they are learning that week.
Impact
Through the teaching of systematic phonics, our aim is for children to become fluent readers by the end of Key Stage 1. Children can then focus on developing fluency and comprehension throughout the school. Attainment in phonics is measured by the Phonics Screening Test at the end of Year 1.
Phonics assessment
At Lower Farm, children making progress is paramount so we assess children in phonics half termly.
The main goal is to get all children to read well, quickly but we do also aim for all children to pass the phonics screening check by the end of Year 1.
For more information about the phonics screen check please click here