Phonics

Phonics at Reigate Park Primary 

What is Phonics? 

Phonics is the knowledge of phonemes and graphemes and how these are used to read and spell words.    Phonemes are the sounds that are made by a single letter or group of letters.  A grapheme is the written equivalent of a phoneme. 

Aims of our Phonics Teaching 

• To ensure the delivery of high quality, systematic phonic work for all children. 

• To establish the consistent practice, progression and continuity in the teaching and learning of phonics and spelling throughout the school. 

• To give all children word work strategies that wlll enable them to become fluent readers and confident writers. 

• To differentiate phonics and spelling work to enable all children to progress and achieve at appropriate levels. 
   

Teaching and Learning 

At Reigate Park Primary, we use The Harmony Trust Phonics Framework to support the teaching and learning of phonics.  We teach phonics every day for 25 minutes from Reception to Year 2. These lessons are taught within their own class and are taught by their class teacher.  We make additional provision for those children who are not at the expected Phase outside of the Phonics session.   

At the end of Year 1 there is a statutory assessment of the children’s phonics skills – Year 1 Phonics Screening Check.  This takes place in June each year.  Parents are informed of the outcomes of this check as part of the Annual Report to Parents. 

Nursery (FS1) 

In Nursery, the children start Phase 1. The children have regular, planned activities to listen carefully and talk about what they hear, see and do. This can be through stories, rhymes, songs, musical instruments and sounds that can be heard all around. By the end of this Phase the children can hear sounds in words, blend them together to read them and also segment them into single sounds. 

Reception (FS2) 

During the Reception year the children will complete Phases 2-4. Soon after starting school, they begin Phase 2. The children are introduced to letters (graphemes) and the sounds (phonemes) that they make. They practise blending the sounds together to read the words and segment them to spell the word. Phase 3 begins once the children know all of the Phase 2 sounds. The children are introduced to digraphs (sounds with two letters) and trigraphs (sounds with three letters). Once the children are able to read and write words with these sounds they can start Phase 4. No new sounds are taught in Phase 4. Instead the children learn to read and spell words with more sounds e.g lamp, bent. 

Year 1 

In Year 1 we cover Phase 5.  In this phase, the children different spellings of the same sounds, eg Recaption children know the grapheme ‘oi’ as in boil.  In Year 1, the children learn ‘oy’ as in boy.  They also learn ‘split digraphs’ eg a-e as in game i-e as in pine. 

Year 2 

In Year 2, we teach Phase 6.  The aim of this Phase is for children to become fluent readers and accurate spellers.  The work that they will cover during this year will include changing words to the past tense and learning how to spell longer words. 

Useful Websites 

The following video shows the correct annunciation of the sounds we teach: 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BqhXUW_v-1s 

Files to Download