Phonics

 At The Rissington school, we use a systematic phonics programme called Success For All Phonics. Each teaching phase builds on the skills and knowledge of previous learning. Children have time to practise and rapidly expand their ability to read and spell words. They are also taught to read and spell ‘Green (decodable) and Red (sometimes known as tricky) words’.

The programme is designed for daily use from the beginning of Reception, enabling children to make smooth transition from Reception to Key Stage 1.  At The Rissington School, we also focus on developing phonological awareness in our Pre-School.

Daily lessons in Success for All Phonics cover GPC's (grapheme-phoneme correspondence)

The individual speech sounds that make up words are called phonemes.  The individual letters or groups of letters that represent the individual speech sounds are called graphemes.  It is the understanding of how graphemes map to phonemes that is essential to reading or "decoding" words efficiently.  A glossary of phonics terms can be found here.

Success for All Phonics is systematic in its approach; it is sequences and progressive.  Progression is built into the programme and skills are taught at each phase:

Phase 1 (EYFS)

Phase 1 of the programme is taught in our Chipmunks, which is our Pre school setting.  Phase 1 focuses on developing phonological awareness by teaching children sound discrimination, rhythm and rhyme, alliteration and oral blending and segmenting. Phase 1 also focuses on developing children's speaking and listening skills and lays the foundations for the phonic work which starts in Phase 2.

Phase 2:  (Reception term 1)

In Phase 2, children learn short sound GPCs and use these to read CVC (consonant, vowel, consonant) words.  (An example of this would be s-a-t).  A small number of common exception words (CEWs) are introduced in phase 2 (an example of a common exception word would be 'the';) in our shared readers and children also practise writing new and previously learnt GPCs in both upper and lower case letters.

Phrase 3 (Reception terms 2-3)

In Phase 3 children learn long vowel digraphs (a grapheme that comprises two letters eg. ck) and read CCVC (consonant, consonant, vowel, consonant words eg. shut) and CVCC words (eg. milk).  Children are introduced to two syllable words.  It is during phase 3 that we introduce spelling and sentence writing and common alternative spellings/pronunciations are introduced.

Phase 4 (Reception term 3)

Phase 4 focuses on reviewing and consolidating all reception level content in preparation for year 1.  Decoding skills are applied to more challenging word structures.

Phase 5 (Year 1 Terms 1-3)

Phase 5  begins in Year 1 and teaches remaining long vowels and split diagraphs (eg. like)  Children learn new graphemes (different ways of spelling each sound) and alternative pronunciations for these: for example, learning that the grapheme ‘ow’ makes a different sound in ‘snow’ and ‘cow’.  They will choose the correct graphemes when spelling, and will learn more red (not fully decodable) words, including ‘beautiful,’ ‘everybody’ and ‘pretty’.  In this phase the children also learn to read nonsense words.

By the end of Year 1, children will be able to:

• Say the sound for any grapheme they are shown
• Write the common graphemes for any given sound (e.g. ‘e,’ ‘ee,’ ‘ie,’ ‘ea’)
• Use their phonics knowledge to read and spell unfamiliar words of up to three syllables
• Read all of the 100 high frequency words, and be able to spell most of them
• Word endings (cious, tion)
• Homophones 
• Form all letters correctly

At the end of Year 1, all children will take part in the statutory Phonics Screening Check to ensure they have mastered the appropriate knowledge.  More information about the Phonics screening check can be found here.

Phase 6 (Year 1 - Term 3)

Phase 6 provides lessons to consolidate spelling skills and includes less common grapheme/phoneme correspondence.