Phonics

At St John’s, phonics begins in Nursery.

Nursery - The 7 aspects:

Aspect 1: General sound discrimination – environmental sounds
Aspect 2: General sound discrimination – instrumental sounds
Aspect 3: General sound discrimination – body percussion
Aspect 4: Rhythm and rhyme
Aspect 5: Alliteration
Aspect 6: Voice sounds
Aspect 7: Oral blending and segmenting.

By the end of phase 1, children will have experienced a wealth of listening activities including songs, stories and rhymes. They will be able to distinguish between speech sounds and many will be able to blend and segment words orally. Some will also be able to recognise spoken words that rhyme and will be able to provide a string of rhyming words. Some children will be ready to start learning synthetic phonics and will move on to our next aspect of phonic teaching: Read, Write Inc.

Read, Write, Inc. is a systematic phonics programme designed to teach children to:

Learn to read and write the 44 phonemes in the English Language
Read using sound blending
Write words by saying the sounds and graphemes
Read some short, simple ditties and then quickly progress to reading the storybooks – this includes developing comprehension skills

Reception, Year 1 and Year 2 children are assessed continuously and grouped in ability for a 30 minute daily, discreet phonics lesson.

The lesson structure comprises of:

Learning a new sound (see the order in the table)
Revision of previous sounds
Practising letter formation / spelling of words
Blending and segmenting
Reading passages/texts

The correct pronunciation of each phoneme can be found here.

Children are provided with opportunities to use and apply their knowledge from the Read, Write, Inc. phonics session in a variety of contexts throughout the day.

From Reception, children also take a reading book home every day. These are Read Write Inc Book Bag Books which link to the sounds already learnt. Adults in school listen to children read regularly throughout Reception and Key Stage 1 to support our ‘Learning to Read’ culture.

All children in Year 2 who have completed the Read, Write Inc Phonics Assessment begin the Read Write Spelling as well as completing regular comprehension tasks and activities. Children continue to revise the phonemes but begin to look at more complex spelling patters to support writing. Spelling teaching continues throughout Key Stage 2 using Read, Write Inc. Spelling.

Bookmarks

Children in KS1 and KS2 are given a bookmark which contains the sounds learnt, red words and some letter formation reminders. These bookmarks are used in all lessons where children are writing to help them remember the phonemes they have already learnt.

Red Words

Red words often cannot often be phonetically decodable therefore we expect children to learn, read and spell these on sight.

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