Intent:

At South Avenue Primary School, we are dedicated to the delivery of high-quality phonics teaching. We strive to ensure that all children become successful, fluent readers by the end of Key Stage One as well developing a love of reading that will stay with our children for the rest of their lives.

Implementation:

At South Avenue Primary School, we follow the systematic, six phases of “Letters and Sounds”. We believe that phonics teaching should be:

• Systematic
• Discrete
• Interactive
• Practical
• Engaging
• Multi-sensory
• Differentiated

Discrete phonics lessons take place daily across Reception and Key Stage 1.  They follow the cycle of ‘Assess, Teach, Practise, Apply’ to ensure that children are consolidating phonic knowledge and skills over time and that they are able to apply them in context. These lessons proceed at pace and incorporate a wide range of practical and interactive learning opportunities to engage the children. These learning opportunities are carefully chosen to ensure that children develop their skills in aural discrimination and phonemic and rhyme awareness, blending and segmenting as well as grapheme-phoneme correspondence.

All teachers are well-equipped with a varied range of resources to use during their phonic sessions which are age and phase appropriate for the children that they are working with. They include practical resources such as the alphabetic code poster, sounds frieze, grapheme tiles, magnetic letters and phonic strips. As well as these resources, there are also age and phase appropriate displays in both Reception and Key Stage 1 classrooms and intervention rooms to support the teaching and application of phonics in Reading and Writing.