St Peter's RC Primary School

PHONICS

Intent

At St Peter's RC Primary school, 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 high quality phonic teaching and experiences, 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 St Peter's we use the Phonics Shed Scheme. This is a DFE validated systematic synthetic phonics programme with coverage from sound awareness in pre-school, into a full phonics scheme of learning that leads into Spelling Shed's complementary spelling system and is also compatible with 2007 Letters and Sounds.

We use the the scheme between Reception and Year Two and beyond where necessary. It is anticipated that when children enter their Reception year, their ears are tuned in to phase one sounds. However, we recognise that this is not always the case. To address this, activities to supprt this phase (Chapter 1) are carefully planned for and resourced and we embed chapter 1 across the provision. As children settle in Reception, they continue to refine their listening skills and are introduced to Chapter 2 which marks the start of synthetic phonics work. They have discrete, daily phonics sessions where they revise previous learning and are taught new graphemes/phonemes, practise together and apply what they have learnt. Children can access Phonics Shed on their EdShed log in to play games that will consolidate their Phonics learning in school. Children take home decodable Phonics books matched to their current Phonics knowledge.

Phonics Shed also aims to foster a love of reading and writing through its strong, character-based narratives and engaging, multi sensory activities. We know that engendering a love of reading is of utmost importance. Each grapheme, phoneme correspondence (GPC) has a strory, song, action and rhyme to introduce it. This provides memory hooks in a variety of approaches to engage the children. There are online game resources and tools available for children to access from home to further support and embed their learning. 

We recognise that children do not always learn in a linear fashion and some children will fall outside of this. These children are provided with learning programmes and interventions to ensure that they are supported to achieve age-related expectations. 

In Key Stage 2, children who still require phonics teaching are identified and provided with personalised learning programmes.

Impact

Through the teaching of systematic phonics, our aim is for children to become fluent readers by the end of Key Stage 1. This will ensure they can access the whole curriculum with ease and is an indicator of future successes throughout the school and their future lives. Attainment is measured by the Phonics Screening Test at the end of year 1 and formative assessments throughout the year. 

 Please see the links below for advice for parents, character overviews and useful resources.