Phonics

We teach Phonics through the SoundsWrite approach. This starts in our Nursery class and continues until children are able to decode and blend to form words. The SoundsWrite programme places an emphasis on focussing on the sounds heard in words. Teachers and teaching assistants delivering this programme follow a set of structured lesson plans ensuring that there is a consistency in delivery across the school. 

Our approach teaches the conceptual understanding needed to become an effective reader:

• that letters are spellings of sounds: visual language is a representation of spoken language
• that a spelling can contain one, two, three, or four letters – examples are: s a t, f i sh, n igh t and w eigh t
• that there is more than one way of spelling most sounds: the sound ‘ae’, spelt as in ‘name’, can be represented as in ‘table’, in ‘rain’, in ‘eight’, in ‘play’, and so on
• that many spellings can represent more than one sound: can be the sound ‘e’ in ‘head’, ‘a-e’ in ‘break’, or ‘ee’ in ‘seat’

Within this conceptual framework, we teach the factual knowledge required to become an effective reader and speller: the approximately 176 spellings that represent the 44 or so sounds in English, starting with the most simple one-to-one correspondences.

Reading and spelling also requires expertise in the skills necessary to make use of the alphabet code and pupils need to be able to:

• segment, or separate sounds in words
• blend, or push sounds together to form words
• manipulate sounds: take sounds out and put sounds into words

Sounds-Write provides opportunities for practising these skills on an everyday basis until pupils achieve the automaticity required for fluent reading and spelling.