Miss Moore is the Phonics Leader at The Blessed Sacrament Catholic Primary School. Phonics is part of our English, Language and Communication Faculty which is led by Mrs Morris.
Phonics and Reading at The Blessed Sacrament
We follow 'Letters and Sounds' to teach children in Nursery, Reception and Year 1. Letters and Sounds is a phonics resource which develops children's speaking and listening skills to prepare children for learning to read phonetically. It sets out a detailed and systematic programme for teaching phonic skills for children starting by the age of five, with the aim of them becoming fluent readers by age seven.
There are six overlapping phases. The table below is a summary based on the Letters and Sounds guidance for Practitioners and Teachers:
Phase |
Phonic Knowledge and Skills |
Phase One (Nursery/Reception) |
Activities are divided into seven aspects, including environmental sounds, instrumental sounds, body sounds, rhythm and rhyme, alliteration, voice sounds and finally oral blending and segmenting. |
Phase Two (Reception) up to 6 weeks |
Learning 19 letters of the alphabet and one sound for each. Blending sounds together to make words. Segmenting words into their separate sounds. Beginning to read simple captions. |
Phase Three (Reception) up to 12 weeks |
The remaining 7 letters of the alphabet, one sound for each. Graphemes such as ch, oo, th representing the remaining phonemes not covered by single letters. Reading captions, sentences and questions. On completion of this phase, children will have learnt the "simple code", i.e. one grapheme for each phoneme in the English language. |
Phase Four (Reception) 4 to 6 weeks |
No new grapheme-phoneme correspondences are taught in this phase. Children learn to blend and segment longer words with adjacent consonants, e.g. swim, clap, jump. |
Phase Five (Throughout Year 1) |
Now we move on to the "complex code". Children learn more graphemes for the phonemes which they already know, plus different ways of pronouncing the graphemes they already know. |
Phase Six (Throughout Year 2 and beyond) |
Working on spelling, including prefixes and suffixes, doubling and dropping letters etc. |
Phonics Overviews
If you wish to support your child at home, you can visit the Letters & Sounds website by clicking here.
and try these online phonics games
Below is a list of websites fill of interactive games to help your child learn their phonic sounds. These vary in level and are suitable for Reception onwards.
Top Marks www.topmarks.co.uk
Search Phonics – There is a wide variety of games on here.
ICT Games www.ictgames.com
Phonics Bloom www.phonicsbloom.com
This whole website is phonics related.
Teacher your Monster to Read www.teachyourmonster.org
Lots of phonics games available here.
If you require any further help with the above then please speak to your child’s teacher or to Miss T Moore (Year 1 Sacrament Teacher and Phonics Lead)
For pronunciation help, watch this video: 'Sounds of the English Phonic Code'
Mrs Jacques has produced some videos that will help you to understand how we teach phonics at school and enable you to support your child with their learning in phonics:
Once the children begin to learn Letters and Sounds, they will be taught to blend the sounds into words. Our early reading books are phonetically decodable up to phase 5 of their phonics.
Children will bring home at least one book per week. We encourage families to read together at least 3 times during a week to help to develop children's reading and fluency.
For details about the curriculum for each year group, please select from the following:
 |
|
|
| Early Years | Year 1 | Year 2 |
|
|
|
|
| Year 3 | Year 4 | Year 5 | Year 6 |