The named Phonics Subject Leader at Our Lady's is Miss K Smith

 

We follow the Sounds-Write phonics programme at Our Lady's, which is a synthetic phonics approach. This strategy develops the children's skills in blending and segmenting sounds (Blending is the ability to push sounds together to build words. Segmenting is the ability to pull apart the individual sounds in words). Initially this is just verbally but then we move onto writing the graphemes (Graphemes are the written symbol of sounds).

 

In Early Years Foundation Stage children learn the initial single letter sounds. They become confident in using sounds to read and spell words with up to 5 sounds in them. They also are introduced to two letters representing one sound such as ch, th and sh.

 

In Key Stage 1 children begin to learn the extended code phonemes. These are 2,3,4 or 5 letters that join together to make a new sound e.g. oi, ay, igh. Children become more confident in recognising these sounds and begin to form patterns to read and write words. Some graphemes represent more than one sound and the children are taught strategies to decode these sounds. the children practice these skills by playing word games on phonicsplay.com and use a range of stories and games from the Sounds-Write programme.