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Reading & Phonics

From their earliest encounters with print, to the time they leave school and beyond, literature offers children a window onto the world, helping them to develop greater insight into the world and gain a deeper understanding of life itself. Through reading, a child is given multiple opportunities to encounter new experiences and make connections beyond their immediate horizons. Simultaneously however, a book can enable a child to make sense of and come to terms with personal circumstances and issues close to them.

At Probus, we aim to nurture a love of books, encouraging and enabling children to become readers for life. In order to facilitate this, we aim to provide children with the effective reading strategies which are vital in enabling them to become fluent, responsive readers. We aim to encourage each child to become a confident, independent reader who is self-motivated to read both for pleasure and to fulfil a given purpose.

The Teaching of Phonics at Probus

At Probus Primary School we use a synthetic phonics programme to teach reading called 'Giant Phonics'. This programme teaches phonics and reading skills in line with Letters and Sounds through six distinct phases. Children are taught to identify sounds in spoken words, recognise the common spelling of each phoneme, to blend phonemes into sounds for reading and how to segment words into phonemes for spellings.

PHASE 1

Phase 1 is designed to teach preschool children to listen attentively, to enlarge their vocabulary and to speak confidently. This phase also aims to support children to discriminate phonemes and reproduce audibly the phonemes they hear through-

Environmental sounds
Instrumental sounds
Body percussion
Rhythm and rhyme
Alliteration
Voice sound
Oral blending and segmenting

PHASE 2

Phase 2 is the start of systematic phonic work. Children begin to understand the grapheme- phoneme correspondence. They will focus on their understanding of how words are constructed from phonemes and that phonemes are represented by graphemes. Children then begin to blend for reading. They start with simple VC (vowel consonant) words e.g. 'at', 'it', 'is' and then move on to CVC (consonant vowel consonant) words e.g. dog, cat, man

By the end of phase 2, the children should know 24 sounds...

s	a	t	p	i	n	m	d
g	o	c	k	ck	e	u	r
h	b	f	ff	l	ll	ss

and be able to read 5 tricky words...

the

They should be able to orally blend cvc words e.g. when you sound out c-a-t, they can tell you the word is cat, and also orally segment cvc words e.g. when you say mum, they can pick out the sounds m-u-m.

PHASE 3

Phase 3 builds on Phase 2. It completes the teaching of the alphabet and children move onto sounds represented by more than 1 letter (including some where the same letters can make different sounds e.g. oo, book, loop)...

DIGRAPHS - 2 letters that make 1 sound e.g. ll ss zz oa ai

TRIGRAPHS - 3 letters that make 1 sound e.g. igh air

j	v	w	x	y	z	zz	qu	ch
sh	th	ng	ai	ee	igh	oa	oo	ar
or	ur	ow	oi	ear	air	ure	er	ur

and 12 more tricky words to read...

he	she	we	me	be	was
my	you	her	they	all	are

They should now, also, be able to spell the 5 tricky words from phase 2.

PHASE 4

Phase 4 does not introduce any new graphemes. The main aim of this phase is to consolidate the children's knowledge and to help them learn to read and spell words which have adjacent consonants, such as trap, string and milk.These can be sounded out but recognising them quickly makes for a stronger reader.

14 more tricky words are added too...

some	come	one	said	do	so	were
when	have	there	out	like	little	what

The children should now be able to write the Phase 3 words.

PHASE 5

Phase 5, Children will learn more graphemes and phonemes. For example, they already know 'ai' as in 'rain' but now they will be introduced to 'ay' as in 'day' and 'a-e' as in 'make'. Alternative pronunciations for graphemes will also be introduced, e.g. 'ea' in 'tea', 'head' and 'break'.

ay	ou	ie	ea	oy	ir	ue	aw	wh
ph	ew	oe	au	ey	a-e	e-e	i-e	o-e
u-e

They should also be able to read and write the 'first 100 high frequency words'.

the	and	a	to
said	in	he	I
of	it	was	you
they	on	she	is
for	at	his	but
that	with	all	we
can	are	up	had
my	her	what	there
out	this	have	went
be	like	some	so
not	then	were	go
little	as	no	mum
one	them	do	me
down	dad	big	when
it's	see	looked	very
look	don't	come	will
into	back	from	children
him	Mr	get	just
now	came	oh	about
got	their	people	your
put	could	house	old
too	by	day	made
time	I'm	if	help
Mrs	called	here	off
asked	saw	make	an

By the end of Year 1, the children should be confidently reading all of these words and writing them accurately too.

PHASE 6

In Phase 6, the focus is on learning spelling rules for word endings or suffixes. They learn how words change when you add certain letters. There are 12 different suffixes taught:

-s	-es	-ing	-ed
-er	-est	-y	-en
-ful	-ly	-ment	-ness

The children are also expected to be able to read and write the 'next 200 common words'.

Supporting Phonics at Home

There are lots of websites that can be used to support your child's ability to segment and blend words for reading and writing throughout each of the six phonic phases.

Below are some links to websites you may find useful. Click on the picture and then select the relevant phase your child is working within. Phonemes (sounds) which your child may be finding particularly challenging can be specifically selected through most websites.

Your child's class teacher will be happy to discuss your child's phonic progress and advice with areas for continued focus.

Parents are continually encouraged to support their children with daily reading at home and from Year 2 children are required to have a minimum of 5 reads a week logged in their yellow Reading Journals.

Useful reading prompts.pdf

Literacy policy final.pdf