Phonics

Phonics forms an essential part of our school curriculum, giving children the important skills needed to successfully begin their journey as readers and writers. The ability to read is one of the most important of all life skills and phonics is the key building block at the very start of a child’s reading journey. Phonics teaching is critical in enabling children to decode for reading. It is also important in enabling children to encode for spelling in their writing. This is why phonics forms such as important part of our curriculum within early years and key stage one at Moordown St. John’s. Our phonics curriculum builds progressively on prior learning, using repetition and interleaving to help children to commit their learning to long term memory.

Intent: What we expect children to learn

At Moordown St John’s, we aim to provide a secure foundation in both the ability to read (decode) texts and to use phonics to spell (encode) phonetically regular words. Children also will be confident in using learnt strategies to read and spell common exception words that do not follow our spelling patterns. Enjoyment of phonics and the colourful world of Monster Phonics, will lead to positive engagements of all groups of children. Through this, all children will have a secure basis to flourish into confident readers and writers.

Implementation: How we teach the subject

Teachers use our phonics scheme, Monster Phonics, to engage children with the colourful world of Monster Phonics and the characters within this world to engage all groups of pupils in their learning. We have a consistency across the school that ensures there is daily teaching on phonics in early years and key stage one.

Children will be taught phonemes and graphemes sequentially to build their phonics knowledge. This begins in early years with the phase 2 and phase 3 sounds. In year one, the children build on this and will learn about alternative grapheme phoneme correspondences. In year two, phonics will take a spelling approach focusing on spelling patterns and silent letters.

Previous learning will be constantly reviewed in the revisit part of each lesson. Guided reading texts will also be closely matched to the graphemes learnt that week to allow children to embed their phonics learning within their reading.

Phonics intervention will be used to support pupils to close gaps in their learning. This will be through daily catch up in year groups for pupils identified by the class teacher and through phonics intervention sessions for pupils with wider gaps. For children who need it, phonics support and teaching will continue into key stage two in small groups or through focused IEP targets.

Impact: How we evaluate the knowledge and skills they have learned  

Children moving from key stage one to key stage two will have a secure basis to build their reading and writing skills. This will enable them to progress in their learning and flourish as readers and writers.

By the end of key stage one pupils will be able to:

• Recognise and identify graphemes within words including alternative phoneme grapheme correspondences.
• Blend words, including polysyllabic words.
• Recognise and read common exception words.
• Use encoding to spell phonetically regular words.
• Spell common exception words for key stage one.

Children will be assessed in a variety of ways including reading at word level, reading within a phonetically matched guided reading text, spelling at word level and spelling within dictated sentences. Teachers will use formative assessment to identify pupils needing additional support and quickly use intervention to address gaps in learning.

Progression Map: