Phonics – Early Reading

Intent

At Park Road Sale Primary School, we are passionate about ensuring that all children become confident and enthusiastic readers and writers. We strive to develop a love of reading and writing in every child and aim to nurture and promote these skills throughout the children’s phonics learning journey. Through our phonics curriculum, we aim to ensure that all children have a secure understanding of the phonemes and graphemes used in the English language and that children can successfully use these early reading skills to decode and encode words accurately. Additionally, we aim to equip all children with the lifelong tools they need to approach unfamiliar words with confidence and resilience (both when reading and spelling) and we intend to always ensure that our phonics teaching is high quality, systematic and consistently meets the needs of all pupils at our school.

Implement

At Park Road, we have developed our own phonics scheme because it allows us to ensure that our phonics teaching is the most effective for the children at our school. Our own scheme focuses on high quality teaching of both the phonemes and graphemes needed to secure word recognition skills which are essential for children to decode and encode words accurately.

Beginning in EYFS and taught throughout KS1 (and used into KS2 if required), our phonics scheme is split into six phases:
– Phase 1 is taught in Nursery (and recapped at the beginning of Reception) and promotes speaking and listening skills, phonological awareness and oral blending/segmenting.
– Phases 2 and 3 are taught in Reception (with Nursery also being introduced to phase 2 towards the end of the year) and focuses on teaching the 42 phonemes in the English language and their corresponding graphemes, as well as developing blending and segmenting skills.
– Phase 4 is taught in Reception and revisited at the beginning of Year 1 as it teaches children to blend and segment consonant clusters and polysyllabic words.
– Phase 5a is taught in Year 1 and focuses on the additional graphemes used to represent previously learnt phonemes.
– Both phase 5b and 5c are also taught in Year 1 and revisited in Year 2 as they focus on teaching alternative pronunciation and spelling of previously learnt phonemes/graphemes.
– Phase 6 is taught in Year 2 and focuses on spelling strategies and other areas of grammar within the English language.
– Phases 2-6 also incorporate the teaching of tricky words, high frequency and common exception words for EYFS and KS1.

In EYFS and KS1, phonics is taught daily for a discrete 30 minute session in small groups. These sessions are fast paced, interactive and purposely repetitive. We follow the same lesson structure (revisit, teach, practise and apply) in every session, regardless of the phase being taught. All phonics teachers follow the same school phonics scheme to ensure a systematic approach because we know that teaching this way best supports the children in our school. In addition, phonic skills are revisited in daily literacy and guided reading lessons and skills are applied further in reading and writing opportunities in other areas of the curriculum.

Our school phonics scheme ensures that children are assessed every term and split into groups according to their understanding of the grapheme-phoneme correspondence, their decoding ability and their blending and segmenting progression. All children are assessed on each phase as they are taught it and gaps from previous phases are revisited in order to ensure high levels of progression. Children do not progress onto the next phase until they are secure and can blend and segment at an appropriate level. As a school, we focus on ‘keep up’ rather than ‘catch up’ and therefore, children who are not secure with learnt phonemes are provided with additional interventions to support their phonics learning. We know that phonics can be tricky for some children and as a result, we can tailor our phonics scheme to suit individual learning needs to ensure that all children make appropriate progress with phonics.

We believe that reading is vitally important and that there are many different elements to reading. Whilst children need to learn to decode, they also need to learn how to understand and interpret what they are reading and importantly, learn to read for pleasure. Following our phonics scheme, children have access to a wide variety of reading books as we do not use one book scheme and instead, we incorporate a number of different schemes into our stock of books to ensure children can access a breadth of books. We believe providing children with the opportunity to pick their own book is an important part of becoming an avid reader. Children have the opportunity to read phonetically decodable books independently each week, as well as books that will develop inference skills and books intended to be shared with an adult to develop that important love and enjoyment of reading.

Children chose their home reading book from book banded sets and are encouraged to change these books multiple times a week. The book banded sets match the children’s reading skills and are assessed using benchmarking; meaning they are at a level in which they can read independently. However, we suggest the children share their home readers with an adult to ensure comprehension skills can be developed at home with the use of adult questioning. Children learning Phase 2 to Phase 5a also take home a phonetically decodable book once a week that matches the phonemes they have been learning in their phonics lessons. The children keep this book for one week to continually practise the phonemes they have learnt and become secure with their phoneme recognition and blending. Children can read these books completely independently and we actively encourage the children to do so. Children also read phonetically decodable books during guided reading sessions both with an adult and independently to further apply the phonemes they have previously learnt. Additionally, children have the opportunity to take home a library book once a week. Library books are not phonetically decodable or matched to the children’s book bands. Instead, they are books intended to be shared with an adult to develop enjoyment and reading for pleasure which we believe is vital in helping children to become competent, fluent readers and to further develop their vocabulary.

Impact

In the summer term of Year 1, children take the government Phonics Screening Check. This progress check requires children to read 40 decodable words (both real and pseudo). Through successfully teaching our phonics scheme, children are well prepared and confident with reading and are equipped with the tools to decode unfamiliar words. The Phonics Screening Check supports teacher judgement and identifies those children who are not at the expected level in reading and therefore, we continue to support these children and provide further interventions to help them to become competent and fluent readers.

By providing our children with high quality, daily phonics lessons we know the impact of our scheme ensures that we are supporting our children to become successful readers and writers through a true enjoyment of phonics lessons. Our school phonics scheme ensures that all children (regardless of ability) are confident encoders and decoders with a secure phoneme-grapheme correspondence. From their daily phonics lessons in EYFS and KS1, the children develop the confidence to read and spell unfamiliar words and therefore, can continue to develop their reading and writing skills as they progress with their learning journey through KS2.