Phonics

At St. Edward's we are committed to the delivery of excellence in the teaching of Phonics. We aim to develop each child so that they are able to read with fluency and inspire a love of reading. Phonics is a key skill that supports the development of early reading skills and our aim is to teach every child to read and write. 

At St. Edward's we follow Letters and Sounds progression. The children are offered a range of opportunities to develop and extend their Phonics skills in Reception and KS1. 

The following information will support your understanding of how we approach the teaching of phonics and word recognition and how, as a parent or carer, you can support and encourage your child at home. 

Phase 1: Children learn rhymes. Keep rhythms and start to relate letter sounds to (starting in Nursery) words. E.g. b for bag.

Phase 2: Children learn initial letter sounds and build 3 letter words.

Phase 3: Children learn all 44 phonemes and blend sounds to read and write words.

Phase 4:  Children blend consonants together to read difficult words e.g. blue, grab.

Phase 5: Children learn how to spell letter sounds in more than one way e.g. rain, day, make.

Phase 6: Children learn how to spell word specific spellings. E.g. turned, beautiful, shopping.

Here is some of the technical vocabulary explained:

Blend(ing) - to draw individual sounds together to pronounce a word, e.g. s-n-a-p

CVC - Consonant - Vowel - Consonant (cat)

CCVC - Consonant - Consonant - Vowel - Consonant (pram)

Grapheme - Written representation of the sounds

Phoneme - Smallest unit of speech sounds sh/i/p 

Segment(ing) - to split up a word into its individual phonemes in order to spell it.

Suffix(es) - a unit of letters such as 'ed' 'ing' that are added to a word to change its meaning e.g. play'ed'