Phonics
LETTERS and SOUNDS
At Marlcliffe we believe that reading development needs to be central to our curriculum. The teaching of phonics is a large part of this; we use Letters and Sounds which is a six-phase teaching programme designed to help teachers teach children how the alphabet works for reading and spelling. Children begin in Reception and their progress is carefully monitored so that children who are not picking up the letter/sound associations can be given additional support.
Click below for more information about how you can support your child at home.
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Phase |
Phonic Knowledge and Skills |
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Phase One (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. |
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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. |
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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. |
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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. |
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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. |
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Phase Six (Throughout Year 2 and beyond) |
Working on spelling, including prefixes and suffixes, doubling and dropping letters etc. |