Whole School Phonics and Reading
Phonics
At Higham Ferrers Nursery and Infant School we use a scheme based on Letters and Sounds to teach phonics. This links to our reading scheme. This scheme contains 6 phases:
Phase 1
Phase 1 falls largely within the Literacy area of learning in the Early Years Foundation Stage. In particular, it will support linking sounds and letters in the order in which they occur in words, and naming and sounding the letters of the alphabet.
Phase 2
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. By the end of the phase many children should be able to read some VC and CVC words and to spell them either using magnetic letters or by writing the letters on paper or on whiteboards. During the phase they will be introduced to reading two-syllable words and simple captions. They will also learn to read some high-frequency ‘tricky’ words: the, to, go, no.
Phase 3
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 (the additional phoneme /zh/ found in the word vision will be taught at Phase Five). Children also continue to practise CVC blending and segmentation in this phase and will apply their knowledge of blending and segmenting to reading and spelling simple two-syllable words and captions. They will learn letter names during this phase, learn to read some more tricky words and also begin to learn to spell some of these words.
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. Some of the alternatives will already have been encountered in the high-frequency words that have been taught. Children become quicker at recognising graphemes of more than one letter in words and at blending the phonemes they represent. When spelling words they will learn to choose the appropriate graphemes to represent phonemes and begin to build word-specific knowledge of the spellings of words.
Phase 6
By the beginning of Phase Six, children should know most of the common grapheme–phoneme correspondences (GPCs). They should be able to read hundreds of words, doing this in three ways:
- reading the words automatically if they are very familiar;
- decoding them quickly and silently because their sounding and blending routine is now well established;
- decoding them aloud.
Children’s spelling should be phonemically accurate, although it may still be a little unconventional at times. Spelling usually lags behind reading, as it is harder. During this phase, children become fluent readers and increasingly accurate spellers.
Phonics Glossary of Terms
| Term | Meaning |
|---|---|
|
Adjacent consonants |
Two (or three) letters making two (or three) sounds. E.g. the first three letters of strap are adjacent consonants. Previously known as a consonant cluster. |
|
Blending |
The process of using phonics for reading. Children identify and synthesise/blend the phonemes in order to make a word. E.g. s-n-a-p, blended together, reads snap. |
|
Consonant digraph |
Two consonants which make one sound. E.g. sh, ch, th, ph |
|
CVC, CCVCC etc. |
The abbreviations used for consonant-vowel-consonant and consonant-consonant-vowel-consonant-consonant words, used to describe the order of sounds. E.g. cat, ship and sheep are all CVC words. Black and prize could be described as CCVC words. |
|
Digraph |
Two letters which together make one sound. There are different types of digraph – vowel, consonant and split. |
|
Grapheme |
A letter or group of letters representing one sound (phoneme) E.g. ck, igh, t, sh |
|
Phoneme |
The smallest unit of sound in a word. |
|
Segmenting |
The process of using phonics for writing. Children listen to the whole word and break it down into the constituent phonemes, choosing an appropriate grapheme to represent each phoneme. E.g. ship can be segmented as sh-i-p. |
|
Split digraph |
Two letters, which work as a pair to make one sound, but are separated within the word. E.g. a-e as in make or late; i-e as in size or write. |
|
Synthesising |
The process of using phonics for reading. Children identify and synthesise/blend the phonemes in order to make a word. E.g. s-n-a-p, blended together, reads snap. |
|
Trigraph |
Three letters which together make one sound. E.g. dge, igh |
|
Vowel digraph |
A digraph in which at least one of the letters is a vowel E.g. ea, ay, ai, ar |
Please click this link to download the Government's Letters and Sounds: Principles and Practice of High Quality Phonics guide.
Reading
At Higham Ferrers Nursery and Infant School we have a broad variety of reading schemes that we like our children to experience. Our schemes are arranged into colour bands, each of which are progressive. The colours start at pink (the easiest level) and go through to ‘free readers’ which are the highest level. In the early stages of our reading scheme there are books which focus on the same groups of letters as our Phonic scheme – Letters and Sounds. These readers provide a good structure on which our children can begin to segment and blend simple new words. As children become more accomplished readers there are opportunities for them to experience non-fiction texts, poetry books and other more complex fiction texts.
As well as hearing pupils read individually, our staff teach reading skills to groups of children. These weekly sessions are called Guided Reading. During the guided reading times, children are taught specific skills that allow them to develop a range of reading strategies such as using character voices during speech, discussing the impact of an author’s choice of vocabulary on the reader, understanding how to read punctuation in a text to give a certain atmosphere, answering questions about a story using clues from the text and much, much more.
