How we teach phonics and reading, support at home

In our school we use a range of materials to teach children to read.

We believe that systematic synthetic phonics teaching should be multi-sensory, taught daily and in small adult led groups.

Download our reading evening presentation to parents here.

Download our Powerpoint presentation on the teaching of phonics here.

How we teach phonics in Key Stage 1

We teach Phonics across five phases as summarised below.

Phase One

Phase One supports the development of speaking and listening. In Phase One, blending and segmenting activities are purely oral, involving no letters, for example, an adult pronounces the sounds to be blended rather than expecting the children to pronounce them in response to letter

Phase Two

The children learn to pronounce the sounds themselves in response to letters, before blending them, and start reading simple VC and CVC words. The reverse process is that they segment whole spoken words into phonemes and select letters to represent those phonemes, either writing the letters, if they have the necessary physical coordination, or using solid (e.g. magnetic) letters to encode words.

Phase Three

Phase Three completes the teaching of the alphabet, and children move on to 
sounds represented by more than one letter ll,ss,ff,ck,ng.

Phase Four

In Phase Four children learn to read and spell words containing adjacent 
consonants. No new grapheme-phoneme correspondences are taught in this 
phase, e.g dump

Phase Five

Phase Five would not be needed if there were a perfect one-to-one mapping 
between graphemes and phonemes – most phonemes can be spelled in more 
than one way, and most graphemes can represent more than one phoneme.

e.g.

ai -  ay   I – ie - igh