Phonics

Phonics at Mossley CE Primary School

Intent:

Phonics is a highly effective method of teaching children to read and spell. Through high quality, progressive phonics teaching, children will have secure phonetic knowledge and have the skills to decode words confidently and apply this to reading and writing. Within our phonics lessons, we also aim to provide children with strategies to identify and decode Common Exception Words. 

Implementation:

We follow the FFT Success for All Phonics programme, which is a complete systematic synthetic phonics programme (SSP) that has been validated by the Department for Education. The sequence of our FFT Success for All phonics programme is outlined below. Children will be taught the GPCs detailed below alongside Common Exception words or 'Red Words'  as some of them are referred to in the programme. Common exception words are words where the usual spelling rule doesn't apply, therefore their phonics knowledge won't always help them to sound out and read the word. Examples of common exception words include: the, are, was, my. 

In addition to our phonics sessions, children take part in daily Shared Reading sessions, where they have the opportunity to apply their phonics knowledge. The Shared Readers are carefully aligned to the phonic lessons and allow children to practise reading the new and recently taught GPCs as well as the Common Exception Words to which they have been introduced. Children in Reception and Year 1 have daily phonics and reading sessions.

Reception

Autumn Term

Sounds taught within the first term in Reception:

s, a, t, p, i, n, m, d, g, o, c, k, ck, e, u, r

h, b, f, ff, l, ll, ss, j, v, w, x, y, z

Spring Term

Sounds taught in the second term in Reception:

zz, qu, ch, sh, th, ng, ai (+blend nk), ee.

igh, oa, oo, oo, ar

Summer Term

Sounds taught in the final term in Reception:

or, ur, ow, oi, ear

air, ure, er

Year 1

Autumn

Sounds taught in the first term of Year 1:

ay, ou, ie, ea, oy

ir, ue, aw, ew

Spring

Sounds taught in the second term of Year 1:

a-e, e-e, i-e, o-e, u-e

-y (happy) -y (fly) ow (snow) soft c (ice) soft g (gem)

Summer

Sounds taught in the final term of Year 1:

ire (fire), are (care), tch (watch), oe (toe), ph (phone)

Impact:

By delivering high-quality phonics, children will demonstrate high levels of engagement in the sessions and will make good progress in line with their year group expectations. They will be confident and resilient in tackling unfamiliar words and will have increased recognition of Common Exception Words when reading and writing. Towards the end of Year 1, children will be well prepared to undertake the Phonics Screening Check.

Year 1 Phonics Screening Check

The Phonics Screening Check is a test to assess how well your child can use and apply the phonics skills that they’ve learnt up to the end of Year 1. The Phonics Screening Check is also an opportunity for teachers to identify students who need help with their phonics. Every child in Year 1 in England has to take the Phonics Screening Check. The child takes the test during a one-to-one sitting with a teacher.

During the Phonics Screening Check, children are asked to read (decode) 40 words. Most of these words are real words, but some are also pseudo-words. A pseudo-word is a fake word that features strings of letters that resemble real words.

If a child doesn’t pass and doesn’t meet the expected standard, they will be given the appropriate support with their phonics to help them eventually reach the expected standard. They will then re-take the Phonics Screening Check the following year.

Phonics Terminology 

Phoneme

The smallest unit of sound in a word is called a phoneme. If you say the word ‘cat’ slowly you can hear 3 phonemes or sounds: /c/ /a/ /t/.

Grapheme

A phoneme written down is called a grapheme. For example, the letter (grapheme) ‘a’ represents the sound (phoneme) /a/. The word ‘cat’ has three graphemes: the letters ‘c’ ‘a’ ‘t’.

GPCs

This stands for Grapheme Phoneme Correspondences. Knowing your GPCs means being able to hear a phoneme and knowing what grapheme to use to represent it. 

Blending

Blending involves merging the sounds in a word together in order to pronounce it. This is important for reading. For example, j-a-m blended together reads the word jam. 

Segmenting

Segmenting involves breaking up a word that you hear into its sounds. This helps with spelling because if you know what graphemes represent the sounds in the word, you can write it! For example, the word jam is segmented into the sounds j-a-m.

Common Exception Words

Common exception words are a group of words that appear commonly in both texts and spoken language, but which can't be decoded using normal phonics rules. For example: the, are, we, you

Useful links for Parents

FFT Success for All Parent Portal: https://parents.fft.org.uk/

Parent Guide to FFT Success for All Phonics : https://parents.fft.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/Parent_Carer_Guide.pdf 

Phonics Pronunciation videos: https://vimeo.com/showcase/9340990 

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