Phonics

At St. Mary's, quality phonics underpins the teaching of reading and writing in the Early Years and Key Stage 1, with phonemic strategies continuing to be taught and embedded in Key Stage 2. 

We use the Sounds-Write phonics programme to teach our children to read, spell and write. Sounds-Write is effective in teaching pupils to read, spell and write because it starts from what all children know from a very early age – the sounds of their own language. From there, it takes them in carefully sequenced, incremental steps and teaches them how each of the 44 or so sounds in the English language can be spelt.

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'

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

Our teachers are very happy to support and give advice; we run parent workshops too, so please look out for the next one!

If you would like to learn more about our approach to phonics, please register for the online course, free for everyone! Click here to see the course and register online!