Phonics at Randwick

Phonics is taught daily using Phonics Bugs in Reception, Year One and Year Two.  It is assessed daily as part of each lesson and assessed formally at the end of each unit.

A large part of the work we do to prepare the children for reading and writing during the transition period is to work on their phonological awareness - hearing the sounds within words, by encouraging them to play games that help them to listen to the initial sound of a word, hear the individual sounds - eye spy, Simon says touch your t-oe-s

At Randwick we begin teaching synthetic phonics as soon as the children are in school using the Phonics Bug scheme. It is a structured, multi-sensory, incremental and code –orientated, instructional approach to teaching children to read and spell.  We also teach high frequency words and spelling lists are provided throughout the year in every year group.

Sounds / letter names – both are taught, but we begin with the pure sound that the letter makes:

‘a’ as in cat

‘s’ not ‘su’

In order to be able to read the children not only need to know and recognise the sounds, but they also need to be able to blend the sounds together to form a word.  This is part of every phonics session, as it is often a tricky thing for the children to master!

We ask that you support by reading a little every day with your child, talking about the story, characters, predicting what migh happen next.  There are usually ideas for things to ask or talk about on the front and back cover of the home reading books.

It is important that we model the correct pronunciationwhen teaching phonics and supporting the children to read.  This is link provides a great reminder of how to pronounce each letter https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LlTw0oiLNys

The order in which we teach the sounds:

Phase 2

Set 1: s, a, t, p

Set 2: i, n, m, d

Set 3: g, o, c, k

Set 4: ck, e, u, r

Set 5: h, b, f, ff, l, ll, ss

Tricky words -  to, I, no, go, the, into

Phase 3

j         v        w       x        y        z,zz

qu      ch      sh       th       ng     

ai       ee       igh     oa      oo     

ar       or       ur       ow     oi       er

ear     air      ure

Tricky words – he, she, we, me, be, was, my, you, her, they, all, are

Phase 4 

Adjacent consonants

Tricky words - said, have, like, so, do, some, come, were, there, little, one, where, out and what 

Reading – we encourage daily reading of their school (scheme) book, but also sharing books at other times.  We have a big focus on reading for pleasure and the children are able to choose a book from the school library with their Y6 buddy.  Each week one child will bring home our class reading bear, they choose a book we have previously shared during story time in class from our class library to bring home to share with you and the bear.

One of the easiest things we can do to boost our child’s brain development is reading with them.