Letters and Sounds Principles and Practice of High Quality Phonics Six Phase Teaching Programme throughout the EYFS and Key Stage 1

What is Letters and Sounds? Designed to foster children’s speaking and listening skills as a preparation to learning phonic knowledge and skills Developed in accordance with the DfE criteria for ‘high quality phonic work’ Teaches high quality phonics from entry into reception, at a generally fast pace but taking into account the capabilities of the individual child

Making a good start- Phase One Phase 1 – develops speaking and listening skills to pave the way for children to make a good start on reading and writing Provides a broad and rich language experience for each child through story, rhyme, drama and song Begins the process of blending and segmenting words orally

Phase 2- on entry to reception Short daily sessions (building up to 20 mins) Opportunities given to use and apply knowledge and skills throughout the day Fast paced Multi sensory approach

Multi Sensory Learning Children will Recognise letters by touch, sight and sounding out simultaneously Manipulate letters from the start to form words Compose words using letter cards or magnetic letters before they may be able to write Build up knowledge of grapheme - phoneme correspondence systematically

Phase 2 Marks the start of systematic phonics Introduces 19 letters Teaches decoding for reading (blending sounds) Teaches encoding for spelling (segmenting sounds) Children read and spell VC and CVC words Read and write Phase 2 sentences and captions Learn high frequency and tricky words

Phase 3 Completes teaching of the alphabet including names of letters Introduces consonant and vowel digraphs Revisits all sounds previously learned Continues blending and segmenting all GPCs Introduces more tricky words and high frequency words Uses ‘sound buttons’

Phase 4 Children learn to read and spell words using adjacent consonants CVCC - best, fact CCVC - grip, glad CCVCC - stand, crisp CCCVC - strap CCCVCC – strand Polysyllabic words – chimpanzee, shampoo Revise all previously learned sounds Read and write Phase 4 sentences, captions and tricky words Learn more high frequency words by sight

Phase 5- beginning of year 1 21 new graphemes Alternative pronunciations of known graphemes eg. ‘low’ instead of ‘owl’ ‘head’ instead of ‘sea’ Phonemes which can be spelled in more than one way eg. air, pear, bare, lay New phoneme ‘zh’ - treasure

Phase 6- beginning of year 2 On entering Phase 6 children should Recognise many high frequency words Decode quickly and silently because sounding and blending is well established, recognising digraphs and not sounding them out as individual letters Decode some harder words aloud Have phonemically accurate spelling although spelling usually lags behind reading Read longer texts independently and with increasing fluency

Phase 6 Phase 6 focuses on Introducing and teaching the past tense Adding suffixes Investigating how adding suffixes and prefixes changes words Teaching spelling of complex words Finding and learning the ‘difficult’ bits in words Choosing the right grapheme from several possibilities Applying rules learned to their individual writing including proof reading