Our Curriculum Intent for Phonics 

In phonics, our provision is designed to ensure that all of our children will learn to read well.  Phonics is the basis for reading and opens the world of books to our children.  We believe that all children should progress through the phonics phases with fluency and confidence and therefore place great importance on high quality teaching and resources.  Phonics and reading are essential tools to access the whole curriculum, to engage and make sense of knowledge, and to explore, question and respond to life in the modern world.  A strong phonics basis enables us to ensure all children flourish as readers and therefore develop socially, emotionally, intellectually and culturally. 

Phonics Teaching

All children are taught phonics through our bespoke systematic synthetic phonics planning.  The individual speech sounds that make up a word are called phonemes.  The individual letters or groups of letters that represent the individual speech sounds are called graphemes. This scheme teaches children to recognise and read phonemes and write the corresponding graphemes.  The children learn to use this knowledge to blend words during reading and segment words for writing. We use a variety of books from schemes such as Big Cat , ORT, Rising Stars, as we believe this provides our children with a broader range of reading material.  All books are carefully matched to the phonics level that the children have been taught. For further information on the phonics sounds please click here.

At Fleet Infant School children are taught through a daily four part phonics session. 

Year R - For the first few weeks, the children focus on Phase 1, using listening activities, stories, rhymes and songs.  For the remainder of the year, they will continue to learn and to practise Phases 2, 3 and 4. Children learn the sounds in order and these sounds are used to blend and segment when reading appropriately levelled phonetically decodable books.  For identified children, Phase 5 may be taught.

Year 1 - Children revisit and are assessed on Phase 2, 3 and 4 and progress on to Phase 5.  They will learn to say and write alternative pronunciations for graphemes and learn to make plausible attempts at most words.  They will be able to apply their blending skills to reading, segment to spell, count syllables and build words to spell.

Year 2 - Children will revisit and identified children will be assessed on Phase 5.   All children will progress on to Phase 6.  There is a focus on adding suffixes and prefixes to words.  They will be taught to make words ending in -y, plural.  They will learn about words with contractions, the use of the apostrophe and to make single nouns possessive and some homophones/near homophones.

Intervention - Throughout the school, robust assessment takes place at least termly and any child who is identified as having gaps in their phonic knowledge, will have short additional practice sessions.

Phonics Screening Check - Attainment is measured through the Phonics Screening Check in Year 1.  For the few children who do not pass the check, Phase 3, 4 and 5 phonics revision and further practice will continue into Year 2.