Subject Lead: Miss Airey
INTENT
At Saint Stephen’s , 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. Phonics is the process that is used to help children break down words into sounds, as well as building letter and word recognition. This can then enable children to use unknown words in the future. Children learn to segment words to support their spelling ability and blend sounds to both read and write the words.
At the end of KS1, children will:
- Have learnt abut phonics through experiencing teaching from Phase One to Phase 6 and develop the skills as listed below.
- Apply the skills they have learnt in both their reading and their writing.
IMPLEMENTATION - HOW DO WE TEACH PHONICS?
Children who join our school in Nursery are exposed to phase 1 phonics – wordless books following the Phonics Bug Scheme of work. As soon as the children enter school in Reception, we begin systematic, synthetic phonics using the Bug Club Phonics programme. We start on phase 2 for most children and provide further phase 1 experiences through provision and activities throughout the Reception year. We use the interactive teaching slides and resources from Bug Club and the accompanying decodable texts.
We feel that the multi-sensory approach using the actions, stories and songs benefits the children with recognition of the graphemes, blending and segmenting. Direct, focussed phonics is taught discretely through a daily session from Nursery until Year 2. Sessions follow the Bug Club Teaching sequence of introduction, revisit, teach, practise, apply, assess learning. All sessions are interactive and appropriate for the age of the children.
IMPACT
Y1 Phonics Check Results over time:
2017: 85%
2018: 74%
2019: 92%
Nov 2020: 69%
Nov 2021: 68%
Target June 2022: 89%
