"Research shows that when phonics is taught in a structured way, starting with the easiest sounds and progressing through to the most complex, it is the most effective way of teaching young children to read."

Department Of Education guidance - learning to read through phonics

National Curriculum

Teachers should ensure that pupils learn grapheme-phoneme correspondences (GPCs) and revise and consolidate those learnt earlier. The understanding that the letter(s) on the page represent the sounds in spoken words should underpin pupils’ reading and spelling of all words. This includes common words containing unusual GPCs. The term ‘common exception words’ is used throughout the programmes of study for such words. Alongside this knowledge of GPCs, pupils need to develop the skill of blending the sounds into words for reading and establish the habit of applying this skill whenever they encounter new words. This will be supported by practice in reading books consistent with their developing phonic knowledge and skill and their knowledge of common exception words. At the same time, they will need to hear, share and discuss a wide range of high-quality books to develop a love of reading and broaden their vocabulary. Pupils should be helped to read words without overt sounding and blending after a few encounters. Those who are slow to develop this skill should have extra practice.

Mission statement

At Fairfield Road Primary School, phonics provides the foundations for reading which helps our children grow in to confident readers with reading for pleasure at the very heart of our reading curriculum.

At Fairfield Road we offer a rich phonics curriculum that allows our children:

• To learn to read and write all 44 graphemes in the English language.
• To embed phonic knowledge and skills with the expectation that they will become fluent readers, having secured word building and recognition skills.
• To feel supported in their phonics learning.
• To be taught high frequency words that do not conform to regular phonic patterns.
• To have opportunities to read texts and words that are within their phonic capabilities as early as possible, even though all words may not be entirely decodable by the children unaided.
• To apply the skill of blending phonemes in order to read words.
• To segment words into their constituent phonemes in order to spell words.

At Fairfield Road, we follow the Read Write Inc. scheme for phonics. Speed Sound lessons occur daily.

• Set 1 sounds +blending (Say the sound, Read the sounds, Review the sounds, Write the letter, Speed write, Fred Talk, Final challenge)

• Set 2 sounds +blending (Say the sound, Read the sounds, Review the sounds, Read the words, Review the words, Reading assessment, spell with Fred fingers, Spell review, Final challenge)

• Set 3 sounds (Say the sound, Read the sounds, Review the sounds, Read the words, Review the words, Reading assessment, spell with Fred fingers, Spell review, Final challenge) Letter names are now used within Set 3.

All children who are on the RWI program are given a username and password for Oxford Owl so they can read their phonics book electronically. The Oxford Owl website offers some informative videos for further information about early reading, story times and sound pronunciations. Please click the link below to find out more.