Phonics at Pakefield 

 

Early Reading

 

Early Reading at Pakefield Primary School

 

At Pakefield, we believe that reading is the key to success and underpins children's access to the curriculum; it impacts significantly upon their achievement. To be able to read, children need to be taught an efficient strategy to decode words. That strategy is called phonics. Phonic decoding skills must be practised until children become automatic and fluent. We use Little Wandle at Pakefield to help us teach the children to read.

Little Wandle is a complete systematic synthetic phonics programme (SSP). We prioritise the teaching of phonics; we teach phonics daily in Year R , Year 1 and Year 2. It is vitally important that children review and revisit Grapheme Phoneme Correspondences (GPCs) and words, daily, weekly and across terms and years, in order to move this knowledge into the children's long term memory. Our consistent approach to phonics ensures that children are given the best possible foundation for reading, writing and language skills and one that goes beyond the phonics check in Year 1.  Not only do we practice this in school, we work with parents and carers to ensure that these skills are built upon at home.

Children need to learn to read as quickly as possible, so that they can move from learning to read, to reading to learn, which then unlocks all aspects of the curriculum.  We have high expectations of and children who are not keeping up with their peers are given additional practice and support to develop their skills.

Children enjoy a range of multi-sensory resources to support their phonics learning. On-going assessment of children's progress takes place and the books children read in school and take home to read are fully decodable and matched to children's secure phonics knowledge. As well as fully decodable books, children take home a non-decodable book for sharing that can be either read to or with them. These books play an essential role in developing a love of reading; an important distinction is that these books are being shared with the children, but they are using fully phonically decodable books to practise their independent reading. 

 

For further information please visit the Little Wandle parents page

 

pakefield primary school phonics overview.pdf

 

Books that come home

 

 

Phase 2

 

Phase 3

 

 

 Phase 5 

Phonics screening check

At the end of Year One all children take part in the national phonics screening check. The check requires children to be able to use all of the sounds learnt up to Phase 5. The check uses real and pseudo (fake) words to assess children's ability to decode. The check takes place in the Summer Term and parents will be informed of the date nearer the time. The results are fed back to parents in the end of year report.

ls parent handout year 1 psc may 2024.pdf

 

 

Ways you can support your child at home?

 Games to support Phonics Teaching:

Play ‘What do we have in here?’ Put some toys or objects in a bag and pull one out at a time. Emphasise the first sound of the name of the toy or object by repeating it, for example, ‘c c c c – car’, ‘b b b b – box’, ‘ch ch ch ch – chip’.

Say: ‘A tall tin of tomatoes!’ ‘Tommy, the ticklish teddy!’ ‘A lovely little lemon!’ This is called alliteration. Use names, for example, ‘Gurpreet gets the giggles’, ‘Milo makes music’, ‘Naheema’s nose’.

 

Teach them ‘Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers’.

• Find real objects around your home that have three phonemes (sounds) and practise ‘sound talk’. First, just let them listen, then see if they will join in, for example, saying:

• ‘I spy a p-e-g – peg.’
• ‘I spy a c-u-p – cup.’
• ‘Where’s your other s-o-ck – sock?’
• ‘Simon says – put your hands on your h-ea-d.’
• ‘Simon says – touch your ch-i-n.’
• ‘Simon says – pick up your b-a-g.’

 

• Magnetic letters
• Buy magnetic letters for your fridge, or for use with a tin tray. Find out which letters have been taught – have fun finding these with your child and place them on the magnetic surface.
• Making little words together
• Make little words together, for example, it, up, am, and, top, dig, run, met, pick. As you select the letters, say them aloud: ‘a-m – am’, ‘m-e-t – met’.
• Breaking words up
• Now do it the other way around: read the word, break the word up and move the letters away, saying: ‘met – m-e-t’.
• Both these activities help children to see that reading and spelling are reversible processes.

 

Other ways to help at home:

We teach lower-case letters, as well as capital letters. As most writing will be in lower-case letters it is useful if you can use these at home. A good start is for your child to write their name correctly, starting with a capital letter followed by lower-case letters.

Your child’s teacher can advise on the handwriting style that is taught and how you can help at home.

 

Here are some of the terms you may come across in our phonics work at school. 

vowels – the open sounds / letters of the alphabet: a,e,i,o and u

consonants – sounds/ letters of the alphabet that are not vowels.

blend – to merge individual sounds together to pronounce a word, e.g. s-n-a-p, blended together, reads snap

cluster – two (or three) letters making two (or three) sounds, e.g. the first three letters of 'straight' are a consonant cluster

digraph – two letters making one sound, e.g. sh, ch, th, ph.

vowel digraphs – two vowels which, together, make one sound, e.g. ai, oo, ow

split digraph – two letters, split, making one sound, e.g. a-e as in make or i-e in site

grapheme – letter or a group of letters representing one sound, e.g. sh, ch, igh, ough (as in 'though')

mnemonic — a device for memorising and recalling something, such as a snake shaped like the letter 'S'

phoneme — the smallest single identifiable sound, e.g. the letters 'sh' represent just one sound, but 'sp' represents two (/s/ and /p/)

segment (vb) — to split up a word into its individual phonemes in order to spell it, e.g. the word 'cat' has three phonemes: /c/, /a/, /t/