Phonics
Phonics at Longton Primary School
Phonics is taught in Key Stage 1 as part of a planned programme with the aims being:
- To equip children to become readers for life.
- To equip the children to become effective spellers.
- To encourage children to see learning to spell as part of the process of learning to write.
- To understand word construction.
- To develop vocabulary and the ability to explore word.
- To apply phonic knowledge to reading and writing.
Teaching and Learning
Foundation Stage and Key Stage 1
In our Reception class high quality phonic work is taught systematically. Letters and Sounds is used as the bases for planning activities within the appropriate Phase. The teacher uses a range of other resources such as Pearson Bug Club Reading Books and a range of interactive games to enhance teaching and learning. In the reception class the children are split between the class teacher and the Assistant teacher to move through the first of the 6 phases of phonics teaching.
In Year 1 and 2 the children continue to work with the class teacher and Assistant Teacher to develop and apply their phonetical awareness.
Phonics is a planned session that takes place for 20 minutes every day within the Foundation class and Key Stage 1. During the sessions outlined above the children are taught:
- Grapheme- phoneme correspondence in a clearly defined sequence.
- The skill of segmenting words into their constituent phonemes to spell.
- That blending and segmenting are reversible skills.
Reading books in Key stage one are linked to the phonics phases.
A Brief Overview of the 6 Phases of Phonics
Phase 1
This phase is where the children will start in the Reception class and it supports the development of speaking and listening.
Phase 2
This is the start of the systematic phonic work. Grapheme- phoneme correspondence is introduced. The children learn to segment whole words and to select letters to represent the phonemes through either writing the letters or using magnetic letters to encode words.
Phase 3
This phase completes the teaching of the alphabet and then moves on to sounds represented by more than one letter, learning one representation for each of the 42 phonemes.
Phase 4
In this stage the children start to read and spell words containing adjacent consonants. There are no new phonemes taught within this phase.
Phase 5
Teaching and learning within phase 5 looks at alternative spellings for some of the phonemes.
Phase 6
This phase marks the transition between the end of Key Stage 1 and Lower Key Stage 2. The children look much more at specific spellings e.g. see/sea. They also learn to spell words with prefixes and suffixes. Words where letters are doubled such as dripped are learnt as are words where letters are dropped e.g. come/coming.
Throughout each of the phases the children will also be taught the tricky high frequency words.
The children are encouraged to use the knowledge they have acquired in their phonics sessions in their reading and writing activities.
Assessment
The children are assessed regularly by staff. They may be asked to read a range of words appropriate to the phase being taught and teachers will always be looking for evidence of phonics being applied in written work. Information from the assessments is put into the transfer file that is passed on to the next teacher at the end of the year.
In June children in Year 1 take a statutory test in phonics. This test is conducted on a one to one basis with the class teacher. The children are asked to read a selection of real and made up words based on the Phases outlined above. The results of these tests are reported to parents.Children who do not meet the required standard in the Year 1 phoncs screening undertake an intensive programme of intervetions using Lancashire Fast Track Phonics before taking the test in the following June.