Phonics
St Mary’s Phonics Curriculum:
At St Mary’s, we follow the GES Simply Letters and Sounds Systematic Synthetic Phonics programme to teach Reception and KS1 early reading. The contents of the programme has been carefully selected from the original Letters and Sounds 2007 and the National Curriculum 2014 documents and follows the same progression.
The building blocks to learning to read and spell within GES Letters and Sounds Systematic Synthetic Phonics programme are phonemic awareness, knowledge of the 26 letters of the alphabet, alphabetic code, the skills of blending and segmenting, reading and spelling high frequency words and ‘tricky’ words, with automaticity in word recognition being the end goal. Additionally, children will master the skills of segmenting to spell words and apply their phonic knowledge to make phonemically plausible attempts to spellings in their written work.
In Reception, children learn Phases Two, Three and Four. When pupils enter Year 1, they learn and master Phase Five. Year 1 pupils’ prior knowledge of Phases Two to Four is built upon in Year 1. Repetition and revision are built into the programme and when children move into Year 2 they revise key learning from Phases 2-5.
Teaching sequence for Phases 2-5:
Introduction | Share learning objectives and success criteria. |
Revisit and review | Revise previous days learning. Practice blending skills to read words and segmenting skills to spell words. |
Teach | Deliver new learning. Teach blending for reading and/or segmenting for spelling. |
Practise | Pupils use blending skills to read words with the newly taught graphemes. Pupils use segmenting skills to spell words with the newly taught graphemes. |
Apply | Provide pupils with opportunities to apply their knowledge and skills through reading captions and/ or sentences. Dictate captions and /or sentences for pupils to apply their knowledge of phonics and segmenting skills. |
Assessment | Assess against criteria for the session. A follow-up may need to be planned. |