Letters and Sounds

1. Letters and Sounds Principles and Practice of High Quality Phonics Six Phase Teaching Programme throughout the EYFS and Key Stage 1

2. What is Letters and Sounds? • Designed to foster children’s speaking and listening skills as a preparation to learning phonic knowledge and skills • Developed in accordance with the DfE criteria for ‘high quality phonic work’ • Teaches high quality phonics from entry into reception, at a generally fast pace but taking into account the capabilities of the individual child

3. Making a good start- Phase One • Phase 1 – develops speaking and listening skills to pave the way for children to make a good start on reading and writing • Provides a broad and rich language experience for each child through story, rhyme, drama and song • Begins the process of blending and segmenting words orally

4. Phase 2- on entry to reception • Short daily sessions (building up to 20 mins) • Opportunities given to use and apply knowledge and skills throughout the day • Fast paced • Multi sensory approach

5. Multi Sensory Learning Children will • Recognise letters by touch, sight and sounding out simultaneously • Manipulate letters from the start to form words • Compose words using letter cards or magnetic letters before they may be able to write • Build up knowledge of grapheme - phoneme correspondence systematically

6. Phase 2 • Marks the start of systematic phonics • Introduces 19 letters • Teaches decoding for reading (blending sounds) • Teaches encoding for spelling (segmenting sounds) • Children read and spell VC and CVC words • Read and write Phase 2 sentences and captions • Learn high frequency and tricky words

7. Phase 3 • Completes teaching of the alphabet including names of letters • Introduces consonant and vowel digraphs • Revisits all sounds previously learned • Continues blending and segmenting all GPCs • Introduces more tricky words and high frequency words • Uses ‘sound buttons’

8. Phase 4 Children learn to read and spell words using adjacent consonants • CVCC - best, fact • CCVC - grip, glad • CCVCC - stand, crisp • CCCVC - strap • CCCVCC – strand • Polysyllabic words – chimpanzee, shampoo • Revise all previously learned sounds • Read and write Phase 4 sentences, captions and tricky words • Learn more high frequency words by sight

9. Phase 5- beginning of year 1 • 21 new graphemes • Alternative pronunciations of known graphemes eg. ‘low’ instead of ‘owl’ ‘head’ instead of ‘sea’ • Phonemes which can be spelled in more than one way eg. air, pear, bare, lay • New phoneme ‘zh’ - treasure

10. Phase 6- beginning of year 2 On entering Phase 6 children should • Recognise many high frequency words • Decode quickly and silently because sounding and blending is well established, recognising digraphs and not sounding them out as individual letters • Decode some harder words aloud • Have phonemically accurate spelling although spelling usually lags behind reading • Read longer texts independently and with increasing fluency

11. Phase 6 Phase 6 focuses on • Introducing and teaching the past tense • Adding suffixes • Investigating how adding suffixes and prefixes changes words • Teaching spelling of complex words • Finding and learning the ‘difficult’ bits in words • Choosing the right grapheme from several possibilities • Applying rules learned to their individual writing including proof reading