Phonics at Forest View Primary School
All of our Early Years and Key Stage 1 teaching and support staff have been trained to deliver the linguistic phonics programme ‘Sounds-Write’. Sounds-Write begins with what the children already know: the sounds of their own language. From there, it takes them through carefully sequenced steps to teach them how each of the sounds in the English language can be written in words.
Our approach teaches children four key concepts:
- that letters are symbols that represent sounds.
- that sounds can be spelled with one, two, three or four letters.
- that the same sound can be spelled in different ways.
- that the same spelling can represent different sounds.
It also gives children the skills necessary to be confident with reading and spelling:
- to be able to segment, or separate the sounds in words.
- to be able to blend, or push sounds together to form words.
- to be able to manipulate sounds by taking sounds out and putting sounds into words.
Our teaching of reading, spelling and writing in school is based around this programme. It begins very early on in Reception class and continues until a child is confident and competent with reading and spelling. At first, children learn to read and write one syllable words with a simple structure and the complexity of word structure systematically builds as they move through the programme. Daily phonics lessons take place from Reception to Year 2, alongside group and one-to-one intervention sessions throughout school.
In Early Years and Key Stage 1, Dandelion and Sounds-Write decodable readers are used both in school and at home to encourage the children to apply their phonic skills and knowledge. Decodable readers are used when children are learning to read and they only contain the phonetic code that the children have been taught. This leads to success in reading which helps to build confidence and encourage a love of reading. It also helps to reinforce the skills and knowledge introduced during Sounds-Write sessions.
At the end of Year 1 there is a statutory assessment in phonics (Year 1 Phonics Screening Check) which takes place in June each year. Parents are informed of the outcomes of this check and any child who has difficulties in meeting the expected standard at this stage will be given additional support in Year 2 to ensure that they have the skills to develop their reading further.
If you would like to learn more about the Sounds-Write programme, please view the following video.