“To learn to read is to light a fire” Victor Hugo
…and lighting that fire is what we want to do in Oppie and Topper Class!
From the very first day of school, children are given a “phonics” book where the daily sound is stuck in. This is then taken home to practise. In school, phonics is delivered using a combination of actions, songs and Pearson Bug Club teaching.
Letters and sounds which we call “phonemes” are taught in six different “phases” or groups.
Children in the Reception year are likely to mainly learn phases 1-3. Letters are primarily taught using their letter sound rather than their alphabetical name, at this stage if children learn that “a” is called “A” it can be very confusing. For examples of how to pronounce phase 2 and 3 sounds:
Phase 1
Phase 1 is predominantly listening skills to support early reading and writing. In order to be able to put sounds together and take words apart to read them, you need to be able to hear different sounds around you, rhythms in songs and nursery rhymes and match and pair similar sounds.
Phase 2
Phase 2 is where we introduce the first set of letters and sounds. Letters are pronounced in a very pure way so the “s” would be “ssssss” rather than “suh”. The order that they are introduced means that simple words can be read by the end of the first week and children can very quickly feel the excitement of being able to read. At this stage, as well as putting sounds together (blending), we are also teaching children to listen for the individual sounds in words (segmenting) which is a vital skill when writing.
Phase 3
Phase 3 completes the single letters of the alphabet and progresses quickly onto two letter combinations which make one sound such as ch, ee and or. These are called digraphs. Towards the end of the phase there are also three letter sounds called trigraphs. Longer words can be blended (read) and segmented and eventually written, for example “meet” or “ship”. We use marks underneath words which we call “sound buttons” to help children to spot phonemes and digraphs, which in turn, supports reading. We sometimes call these sausages and peas, the peas (spots) sitting under the single sounds and the sausages sitting under the 2 or three letter sounds.
Alongside the introduction of letters and sounds, we also systematically introduce “tricky words” which do not contain regular phonic sounds and cannot be decoded like most words. These are words like “no”, “the”, “he”. In these cases we look with the children at which letter is being “naughty” and making a different sound. Much of the time we can identify that the vowel is making its letter name rather than its phonic sound.
Phases 2 and 3 are very important and provide children with access to most of the sounds they will need to write any word. Although the words might not be spelt “correctly”, apart from tricky simple words, we want the spellings to be “phonetically plausible” meaning we can read the phonemes used to understand the writing. This is a time of great freedom for most children, where they suddenly have the capacity to write whatever they want - a very exciting time!
There is a lot to learn in these phases. Particularly Phase 3. For this reason it is taught in the Autumn term and then consolidated in the Spring and often part of the Summer Term.
When children are confident recognising and blending their Phase 2 and some of their Phase 3 sounds they are introduced to the school reading scheme which is phonetically decodable and systematically runs alongside the “Pearson Bug Club” phonics scheme taught in school. Children are given books to read at home which are then changed when read.
Phase 4
Phase 4 is a phase where children are supported to read longer words with adjacent consonants which are called “blends”. This is where consonant clusters do not form to make a new sound but children have to learn to blend and segment the sounds. Examples of this could be “help” “just” “flight” or “struck”. Longer polysyllabic words (words with more than one syllable) are taught in this phase.
Phase 5
Phase 5 is where alternative spellings are taught, so for the “ai” sound, children will be introduced to the graphemes “ay”, “a-e”, “eigh”, “ei” and “ey”. There is a lot of learning and practice needed for this so although it is often lightly introduced in the summer term of the Reception Year, it is then consolidated throughout Year 1 and often for part of Year 2. Children learn to differentiate between which grapheme to use and start to learn to apply them in writing.
Phase 6
By Phase 6 children are becoming competent readers and moving away from “learning to read” to reading for pleasure and to find information. Children are still learning spelling patterns and practise using and reading prefixes (letters before a word such as “un” or “re”) and using suffixes successfully in writing (letters added to the end of the word for example “ed” “ing” “es”). Spelling tends to slightly lag behind reading as it is more difficult and it is not unusual to find slightly unconventional phonetically plausible spellings at times.
The Year 1 phonics screening check is not a formal test, but a way for our teachers to ensure that children are making sufficient progress with their phonics skills to read words and that they are on track to become fluent readers who can enjoy reading for pleasure and for learning.
The phonics screening check for current year 1's should take place June. More information can be found in this video.