Phonics
Phonics and Early Reading
At Wybers Wood Academy we believe that developing strong reading skills are crucial for the children to develop a love of learning and to be able to access the wider curriculum.
What is Phonics?
A method of teaching beginners to read and pronounce words by learning to associate letters or letter groups with the sounds they represent. There are 44 main sounds in the English Language. Each sound is represented by a grapheme (the written representation of a sound).
Phoneme: the smallest single identifiable sound in a word. For example, in the word ‘cat’ there are three phonemes c/a/t.
Grapheme: the written representation of a sound.
Digraph: two letters making one sound. For example, /sh/ in the word ‘shop’.
Trigraph: three letters making one sound. For example, /igh/ in the word ‘night’.
Split digraph: two vowel letters split but are split by one or more consonants. For example, /a-e/ in the word ‘cake’.
What Phonics programme is used in school?
For the teaching of phonics, we use the DfE accredited ‘Essential Letters and Sounds’ programme. Children are actively taught and supported to use phonics as the prime approach to decoding, avoiding the use of other strategies. Children should not need to resort to guessing or using the pictures or grammatical context.
For more information on ELS, click here. https://home.oxfordowl.co.uk/reading/reading-schemes-oxford-levels/essential-letters-and-sounds/
Below you will find the progression of the programme:
Harder to Read and Spell Words
As well as Phonics it is important that children learn a sight vocabulary of words that appear frequently in reading, we call these Harder to Read and Spell words or HRS words. The children will learn these daily in Phonics and Guided Reading.
Children will also have a HRS Word Book that they will bring home everyday, this will give them the opportunity to practise the words at home for 5 minutes everyday. Our aim is that children will learn these words a year ahead of Age Related Expectations; eg at the end of Year 1 children will know all the words expected for Year 2.
As children learn the words they will be rewarded with certificates and prizes in class to encourage them.
Phonics Screening Check
What is the Phonics Screening Check?
The Phonics Screening Check is a quick and easy check of your child’s phonics knowledge. It helps the school confirm whether your child has made the expected progress. It is administered when children are in Year 1 (the month of June).
What are ‘non/pseudo-words’?
The check will contain a mix of real words and ‘non-words’ or ‘pseudo-words’ (or ‘nonsense/alien words’). Children will be told before the check that there will be non-words that he or she will not have seen before. Many children will be familiar with this because many schools already use ‘non-words’ when they teach phonics. Non-words are important to include because words such as ‘vap’ or ‘jound’ are new to all children. Children cannot read the non-words by using their memory or vocabulary; they have to use their decoding skills.
After the check
The school will tell you about your child’s progress in phonics and how he or she has done in the screening check in the last half-term of Year 1.
If your child has found the check difficult, your child’s school should also tell you what support they have put in place to help him or her improve. You might like to ask how you can support your child to take the next step in reading.
Children who have not met the standard in Year 1 will retake the check in Year 2. All children are individuals and develop at different rates. The screening check ensures that teachers understand which children need extra help with phonic decoding.
Key Stage Two
Where needed, children take part in phonics intervention at the appropriate phase for their ability. This is offered as bespoke, high quality sessions twice a week ensuring that all children leave our academy as fluent readers. All children who are accessing phonics sessions take home a phonic decodable book which is precisely matched to their phonic ability. These books are changed on a weekly basis which allows parents and children to celebrate their reading success.
As you will see (and hear) as you walk around our academy, reading is a huge priority at Wybers Wood and underpins everything we do, allowing children to access the full curriculum offer
Launchpad for Literacy is an approach used to support children in learning pre-phonics skills.
The programme is predominantly used within the Early Years Foundation Stage where it is used to improve outcomes by creating firm foundations in pre-phonic skills and readiness for reading.
Where pupils leave the Early Years Foundation Stage and still require support in pre-phonics skills, Literacy Launchpad will continue to support them by identifying and closing specific skill gaps.
Reading at Home
At Wybers Wood Primary Academy we start children’s reading journey by providing every child that starts in Reception with an amazing book bag package that includes; a book of nursery rhymes, a traditional story and a guide for supporting early phonics and reading at home.
Every week children will be encouraged to select a book to read for pleasure and share with and adult. This is for the purposes of developing their comprehension skills and ensuring children and adults have an enjoyable and rich reading experience together. Many of these books are taken from the ‘Top 30 books’ for each year group and other books they will know and love.
When children are ready and blending words independently, they will start to bring home decodable ELS books matched to their current reading level. We make sure that pupils read books that are closely matched to their increasing knowledge of phonics and the common exception words. This is so that, early on, they experience success and gain confidence that they are readers. Re-reading and discussing these books with the teacher supports their increasingly fluent decoding.
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Assessment of Phonics:
Our pupils are monitored daily throughout their phonics sessions to ensure that no pupils get left behind. If a child is struggling to embed the current learning, then swift and timely intervention is put into place immediately.
Pupils are assessed half- termly by the class teacher using Phonics Tracker.
Useful Information & Links
Ten top tips for reading stories to your child
1 – Make reading to your child feel like a treat. Introduce each new book with excitement!
2 – Make it a special quiet time and cuddle up so both of you can see the book.
3 – Show curiosity in what you’re going to read: Oh no! I think Arthur is going to get even angrier now.
4 – Read the whole story the first time through without stopping too much. If you think your child might not understand something, model an explanation: Oh I think what’s happening here is that…
5 – Chat about the story: I wonder why he did that? Oh no, I hope she’s not going to… I wouldn’t have done that, would you?
6 – Avoid asking questions to test what your child remembers.
7 – Link stories to your own experiences (e.g. This reminds me of…)
8 – Read favourite stories over and over again. Get your child to join in with the bits they know.
9 – Read with enthusiasm. Don’t be embarrassed to try out different voices. Your child will love it.
10 – Read with enjoyment. If you’re not enjoying it, your child won’t.