Phonics

A key intent for our curriculum is quality teaching and application of phonics from the Early Years to Key Stage 1. Phonics teaches children to read and write by blending and segmenting individual sounds. Children in Early years and Key Stage 1 take part in daily phonics sessions which focus on skills such as decoding to read words and segmenting the sounds in a given word to spell. We also teach children to spell ‘tricky words’ which are words that you cannot sound out.

Digraph – two letters make one sound (e.g. sh, ch, ai, ea, ou, ow).

Trigraph – three letters make one sound (e.g. igh, ear, air, ure).

Split digraph – two letters make one sound but the letters have been split apart by another letter. (e.g. the a - e sound in cape)

Phoneme – a single unit of sound

Grapheme – a written letter, or group of letter that represent a sound.

Consonants – b, c, d, f, g, h, j, k, l, m, n, p, q, r, s, t, v, w, x, y, z

Vowels – a, e, I, o, u

Blend – to put or merge the sounds together to make a word (e.g. the sounds d-o-g are blended to the word ‘dog’.)

Segment – to break down the word into its individual sounds to spell (e.g cat can be split into the sounds c-a-t.).

Sound talk – a method of segmenting words, saying each sound on a finger (starting with the thumb) and putting it on your chin, as you say it.

We follow the ‘Twinkl’ phonics programme and click below to see a long term overview.

Spelling

Once children reach Key Stage 2, spelling is taught through whole class spelling lessons. A new spelling rule or sound is covered each week and children practise their spellings in a range of different ways.

We follow the ‘Twinkl’ spelling programme and click below to see a long term overview of the spellings covered.