Phonics and Reading Scheme

Bailey Green Primary School together with Bailey’s Butterflies 

Teaching of Phonics and Reading

Here at Bailey Green we teach Phonics and Reading through a Systematic Synthetic Phonics
Programme using Essential Letters and Sounds.

Phonics is a way of teaching children to read quickly and skilfully. They are taught how to:

– recognise the sounds that each individual letter makes; – identify the sounds that
different combinations of letters make such as /sh/ or /ee/; and – blend these sounds
together from left to right to make a word. Children can then use this knowledge to
‘decode’ new words that they hear or see. This is the first important step in learning to read. Phonics is taught throughout Reception, Key Stage 1 and Key Stage 2 when children
will use their knowledge for reading and writing.

Throughout Nursery and Reception, children will take part in a variety of speaking and listening activities for Phase 1. This type of work is crucial in promoting language development and helping children to discriminate between different sounds. As children move up throughout the school, this type of work is threaded throughout our English and Reading sessions.

In Reception, children are taught very quickly to learn to recognise, say and write
individual sounds through our Reading Scheme Essential Letters and Sounds.

They are taught in the following order:

s a t p i n
m d g o c k
ck e u r/ ss
h b f ff ll
j v w x y z zz

We introduce letter sounds and names alongside each other– My name is S and I make the sound sssss. Each sound is also taught with a mnemonic which is a catchy saying to help children remember. Single letter mnemonics help our children to form letters correctly.

As children develop their reading skills, children will begin to learn the following digraphs (2 letters which make one sound) and trigraphs (3 letters which make one sound)

qu ch sh th ng nk
ai ee igh oa
ar ur oo or
ow oi ear air
ure er ow

These are also taught with mnemonics and pictures to help children remember: e.g arstar from afar.

In Phonics, it’s important to pronounce “pure sounds”: for example, the sound /m/ is
pronounced ‘mmmm’ and not ‘muh’ or ’em’. This makes it much easier for children to blend sounds together to read. You can find examples of each sound in the videos below:

Link 1: https://vimeo.com/641445921/9382cf6db0

Link 2: https://vimeo.com/642342878/59d233684c

As children begin to develop their phonics strategies, children are introduced to alternative sounds for example, sound /ee/ can also be represented in the written form ea for tea and ey in monkey. Phonics is taught weekly in KS2 at Bailey Green This work helps our children to become confidence in spelling patterns and strategies.

Reading and Decodable Books
Essential Letters and Sounds is a fully decodable programme. Our Reading scheme Oxford Reading Tree, matches Essential Letters and Sounds.
This means that children in Reception will initially bring home books for discussion – these books have no words and are picture based, so that you can talk about what the children can see, to make predictions and to encourage their language and vocabulary
development. As initial letter sounds are introduced to the children, they will then begin to bring home books with 1 or 2 words and a simple sentence.
As children move into KS1, they will continue to bring home books which have been carefully matched to the sounds taught in school that week. To best support us in teaching your child how to read we ask that you read the decodable text provided by the school 4 times across the week. Spending 10 minutes a day reading with your child will hugely support them in their journey to becoming an independent reader. As children become more confident with blending and fluency, they will bring home an additional book to challenge their comprehension and understanding.

Assessment of Phonics
We track our children throughout each Phonic Phase using Phonics Tracker to monitor both achievement and progress. Our main emphasis on the assessment of phonics is on how effectively the children are able to apply their learning into reading and writing. This provides the evidence that the phonic learning is fully embedded. If necessary, further support through targeted interventions is provided for children to enable them to keep up with the
phonics programme.