Phonics at St Mary’s
Here at Tickhill St Mary’s we recognise the importance of developing children’s early reading and writing skills. We use a hybrid model of Letters and Sounds with some strategies from Read Write Inc. and Jolly Phonics to help us achieve this. The children are taught in small, similar ability groups and are regularly assessed by their class teacher or teaching assistant to ensure that we are best meeting their needs.
Each lesson lasts between 20-30 minutes and are structured following the planning cycle;
Following this sequence ensures that every lesson has a good pace and a clear structure. We aim to make the lessons fun for the children by planning a wide range of activities which enable them to practise and apply their skills in a wide range of contexts. Sounds are taught across two days with one day focused on reading and the second day on writing with Friday being a recap of that week’s learning. This allows the children to be taught how to apply their new learning in both reading and writing.
In order to encourage and motivate the children, many different fun praise actions are used:
Letters and Sounds has six phases as follows;
Phase One: 7 aspects under 3 strands;
Phase Two: The purpose of this phase is to teach at least 19 letters, and move children on from oral blending and segmentation to blending and segmenting with letters.
Phase Three: The purpose of this phase is to teach another 25 graphemes, most of them comprising two letters (e.g. ‘oa’), so the children can represent each of about 42 phonemes by a grapheme.
Phase 4: The purpose of this phase is to consolidate children’s knowledge of graphemes in reading and spelling words containing adjacent consonants and polysyllabic words.
Phase 5: The purpose of this phase is for children to broaden their knowledge of graphemes and phonemes for use in reading and spelling. They will learn new graphemes and alternative pronunciations for these and graphemes they already know, where relevant.
Phase 6: (SPAG) During this phase, children become fluent readers and increasingly accurate spellers.
By the beginning of year two we expect that the majority of children will progress onto SPAG. Those children who do not pass their phonic screening check in year one will receive daily phonic lessons plus intervention to support them in catching up quickly to their peers.
Key strategies included in our phonic lessons:
Tricky and High Frequency words
We teach tricky and high frequency words in line with each Letters and Sounds Phase. Children are regularly assessed on their ability to read and write these words and a record of this is kept in order to try and close any gaps and move learning forward.
Phonic sounds
It is important that sounds need to be taught in the purest form. The correct way of saying the sounds can be found using the following link:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-ksblMiliA8
(This will give a You Tube link to the sound clip – Articulation of Phonemes)
We also use the Jolly phonic songs and actions to support with introducing each sound. They can be found using the following links:
Phase 2: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=74kIrFdOaPw
Phase 3: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ixndECFUbIo
Key Vocabulary
The sound ‘igh’ can be written with the grapheme igh (night) or i (knife) or ie (tie)
Useful Websites: