Our Lady’s Catholic Primary School

Here at our Lady's we love to read!

Intent

At Our Lady's Catholic Primary School  we intend to ensure all children become successful, fluent readers by the end of Key Stage One and believe this is achievable through a combination of strong, high quality, discrete phonics teaching combined with a whole language approach that promotes a ‘Reading for Pleasure’ culture.

We intend to do this by:

• Implementing the Twinkl phonics scheme throughout EYFS and KS1 And where needed into KS2.
• Using high quality resources consistently across all classes.
• Creating an environment where phonics is demonstrated and applied throughout their learning.
• Ensuring children are confident with their grapheme, phoneme correspondence knowledge. They can apply segmenting and blending to ensure they are able to read words which they have never come across before.

Implementation

We teach the children as a whole class so that every child is exposed to the phonemes and graphemes which are at the expected level for their age.  Children in Nursery receive level 1 teaching.  Children in Reception are taught level 2 up until Christmas.  From January they begin working on level 3 and then they spend the second half of the summer term working on level 4.  Children in Year 1 will revisit level 3 and 4 and begin working on level 5 and children in year 2 begin working on level 6.

Children are taught how to break down words into their individual sounds in order to read and how to segment words into their individual sounds in order to spell them in their writing.

KS2 children who still require phonics input will be taught in very small groups and receive extra intervention. 

• The National Curriculum statutory statements will be implemented in the Twinkl phonics sequence.
• Use the high quality Twinkl phonics resources throughout phonics to ensure consistency.
• Provide quality first teaching in line with the teaching standards.
• Provide quality examples and demonstrations of how to say each phoneme and apply to words clearly.
• Allow children opportunities to read both real and nonsense words.

All staff

1. Uses assessment to ensure that all children are learning the phonemes which they need to progress with their reading.
2. Delivers high quality phonics lessons using Twinkl phonics resources.
3. Demonstrates clearly the pronunciation of phonemes.  Allows the children time to apply their phonic skills throughout the school day.

Impact

To measure impact we will ask:

What impact has the implementation had on;

• Standards in phonics screening check for pupils at the end of Year 1 and Year 2.
• Ability to recall and use phonemes with good grapheme, phoneme correspondence.
• Ability to segment and blend confidently with real and nonsense words.
• The ability to apply phonics skills when reading.
• The coverage of phonemes
• The ability to apply their phonics skills and apply to other areas of the curriculum.

A phoneme is mastered when the child is able to read confidently and apply the phoneme in a range of words, unaided.  The child should be able to apply their knowledge when blending to read a range of real and nonsense words. 

This will be assessed using phonics tracker and mock screening checks at regular intervals throughout the year.

We regularly assess children using phonics tracker.  This data is used to help us identify children who need a little bit of extra help to catch up.  Interventions are carefully planned to meet the needs of individual children.

Year 1 children will take a phonics screening check in June.  Parents will be informed of the results with the annual school report.

Expectations

In Reception by the end of Autumn term it is expected that children will have completed phase 2 and be able to segment and blend words containing the phase 2 graphemes.

In Reception by May it is expected that children will have completed phase 3 and be able to segment and blend words containing the phase 2 and phase 3 graphemes.

In Reception by July it is expected that children will have completed phase 4.

In Year 1 it is expected that children will have completed phase 5 by the end of July and are able to segment and blend words for reading and spelling which contain the phase 2, 3, 4 and 5 graphemes.

In Year 2 it is expected that children will have completed phase 6 by the end of July and are able to apply the rules for adding prefixes and suffixes to words.

You will be invited into school to see us teaching phonics at regular intervals during the school year.

 Below are some documents that you may find useful in supporting your child's phonic development at home.

The single most important thing you can do to support your child effectively with phonics is to pronounce pure sounds as your children are taught to in school.  The video below shows how each phoneme should be articulated.

Twinkl phonics introduction for parents - this document will define key terminology that we use in school and your children will use.  It explains how synthetic phonics works and outlines the expectations for what children should be able to do by the end of each level.  Additionally there is information about the Year 1 phonics screening check and suggestions for how to help your child at home.  This is a really useful resource.