The school uses BUG Club Phonics in our infant class which follows the Letters and Sounds programme. We use actions from Jolly Phonics to support the BUG CLUB programme.
For pupils in the junior class we deliver regular guided phonics/spelling sessions and we use Rapid Readers which is a programme specifically aimed at higher aged pupils struggling with reading.
In Reception the children are taught phonics in small ten or fifteen minute teaching sessions. As they move to Year 1 and Year 2 children receive a minimum of 30 minute activities on phonics every day. As a result our very small groups and daily sessions, standards in phonics at the end of Year 1 are consistently above the national average. There are also top up activities during our Guided Reading sessions (four times a week) and strong links are made in other lessons.
Letters and Sounds is a phonics resource published by the Department for Education and Skills in 2007. It aims to build children's speaking and listening skills in their own right as well as to prepare children for learning to read by developing their phonic knowledge and skills. It sets out a detailed and systematic programme for teaching phonic skills for children starting by the age of five, with the aim of them becoming fluent readers by age seven.
Phase One - Activities are divided into seven aspects, including environmental sounds, instrumental sounds, body sounds, rhythm and rhyme, alliteration, voice sounds and finally oral blending and segmenting.
Phase Two - Learning 19 letters of the alphabet and one sound for each. Blending sounds together to make words. Segmenting words into their separate sounds. Beginning to read simple captions.
Phase Three -The remaining 7 letters of the alphabet, one sound for each. Graphemes such as ch, oo, th representing the remaining phonemes not covered by single letters. Reading captions, sentences and questions. On completion of this phase, children will have learnt the "simple code", i.e. one grapheme for each phoneme in the English language.
Phase Four - No new grapheme-phoneme sounds are taught in this phase. Children learn to blend and segent longer words with adjacet consonants, e.g. swim, clap, jump.
Phase Five-Now we move on to the "complex code". Children learn more graphemes for the phonemes which they already know, plus different ways of pronouncing the graphemes they already know.
Phase Six -Working on spelling, including prefixes and suffixes, doubling and dropping letters etc.
phoneme — the smallest single identifiable sound, e.g. the letters 'sh' represent just one sound, but 'sp' represents two (/s/ and /p/)
blend (vb) — to draw individual sounds together to pronounce a word, e.g. s-n-a-p, blended together, reads snap
segment (vb) — to split up a word into its individual phonemes in order to spell it, e.g. the word 'cat' has three phonemes: /c/, /a/, /t/
grapheme — a letter or a group of letters representing one sound, e.g. sh, ch, igh, ough (as in 'though')
digraph — two letters making one sound, e.g. sh, ch, th, ph.
vowel digraphs comprise of two vowels which, together, make one sound, e.g. ai, oo, ow
VC, CVC, CCVC — the abbreviations for vowel-consonant, consonant-vowel-consonant, consonant-consonant-vowel-consonant, and are used to describe the order of letters in words, e.g. am, Sam, slam