Phonics

Phonics is taught through a highly structured approach of daily lessons across the school. In order to meet the needs of all the children, teaching is often in groups differentiated according to children’s phonic awareness and development.

The Twinkl scheme is followed, providing a synthetic approach to the teaching of phonics. The children learn through stories which provide context to the learning alongside the use of a multi-sensory approach including songs and actions. Each session gives an opportunity for children to revisit their previous experience, be taught new skills, practice together and apply what they have learnt.

Phonics Levels

There are 6 main phonic levels that children progress through.

Level 1 – This begins in nursery and concentrates on developing children’s speaking and listening skills and lays the foundations for the phonics work which starts in Level 2. The emphasis during Level 1 is to get children attuned to the sounds around them and ready to begin developing oral blending and segmenting skills.

Level 2 - As children move through Reception they are introduced to Level 2 which marks the start of systematic phonic work. Grapheme-phoneme correspondences are introduced as well as letter names. The process of segmenting whole words and selecting letters to represent those phonemes is taught.

Level 3 – By the time children reach level 3, they will already be able to blend and segment words containing 19 letters taught in level 2. During this phase, children will continue to use the sounds when decoding words. Level 3 completes the teaching of the alphabet and then moves on to cover sounds represented by more than one letter, learning one representation for each of the 44 phonemes. At this stage just one spelling is given for each phoneme.

Level 4 - When children become secure they continue into Level 4 where they start to read and spell words containing adjacent consonants. No new phonemes are introduced at this level.

Level 5 - The children will enter Level 5 as they begin Year 1, looking at alternative spellings for some phonemes and allowing the children to see the range of ways phonemes can be represented e.g. ai in rain, ay in play and a_e in make. Alternative pronunciations for graphemes will also be introduced.

Level 6 - The children entering Year 2 will start Level 6 which develops a variety of spelling strategies including word specific spellings e.g. see/ sea, spelling of words with prefixes and suffixes, doubling and dropping letters where necessary.

Twinkl Phonics Level 2 Sounds and Actions

Twinkl Phonics Level 3 Sounds and Actions

Twinkl Phonics Level 5 GPCs: Pure Sounds, Actions and Mnemonics

Twinkl Phonics Level 6 GPCs: Pure Sounds and Mnemonics

Phonics Assessment

Children are formally assessed at the end of each half term. The progress of children’s phonics skills are continually assessed and reviewed to ensure that they are accessing phonics that meets their individual needs and stage.

The national phonics screening check is performed in June of Year 1. Prior to this, the Year 1 phonics workshop gives parents information about how they can support their children at home with phonics. The purpose of the screening check is to confirm that all children have learned phonic decoding to an age-appropriate standard. The children who did not meet the required standard for the check in year 1 enter again in year 2 with additional support.

Below are some links for you to support your child at home:

Phonics Terminology

Phonics Play

Roy - The Tale of a Singing Zebra

Phonics Bloom

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