Phonics and Reading Schemes

Phonics At Adel Primary School

At Adel Primary, we know how important it is for parents and teachers to work together to give your child the best start. Reading together at home is one of the most effective and important ways in which you can help your child. Children should be encouraged to enjoy sharing books and read independently, as well as reading with an adult. This not only supports children’s progression in reading but leads to them seeing reading as a source of pleasure and interest.

To support your child in becoming an effective and confident reader we hope to work with you to develop their knowledge of phonics (letter sounds) to enable them to decode different words they may come across. Through this information, we hope to give you an overview of phonics teaching with your child, and some ideas for how you can support your child at home.

We also want to give you further information about the books your children will bring home. Due to recent government guidance, your child will bring a book home that is entirely decodable at their current Phonics level. This means that your child should be comfortable and able to read the whole book independently without support. Rather than the book they bring home being a challenge, it should be a fluent read that increases their confidence. Your child will have the opportunity to bring a book home each week. In Reception and Year 1, they will also be given a log in and access to an additional book which their class teacher will assign through our E-Readers. They are also free to read widely at home either by themselves or with the support of an adult from a wide range of sources. This could include comics, picture books, longer books, information books or enjoying a bedtime story with an adult reading to them.

What is Phonics?

The alphabet contains only 26 letters. Spoken English uses about 44 sounds (phonemes). These phonemes are represented by letters (graphemes). In other words, a sound can be represented by a letter (e.g. ‘e’ or ‘p’) or a group of letters (e.g. ‘sh’ or ‘air’). A letter consists of: a sound, a shape and it has a capital form and a lower case form. The letter sound is the first thing that children need to recognise. An important factor to remember is…….. only use capital names when the children know the letter sounds.

At Adel Primary, we follow Government guidance which refers to 6 phases of Phonics teaching. Our school follows the Bug Club Phonics program of Phonics teaching. The six phase teaching programme focuses on high quality phonics work. The intention is to

‘Equip children who are 5 with the phonic knowledge and skills they need to become fluent readers by the age of 7.’

In Year 1 the children sit a phonics test which consists of 40 decodable words. They are split into 2 groups – real words and nonsense words. This test takes place in June and since 2012 when the test began, the pass mark has been 32 marks. However, this could change at any time.

We operate a 'keep up not catch up' approach, where all children in that year group are exposed to the same phonemes and graphemes at the same time, but rest assured that any children needing extra support will receive it. We carry out daily phonics interventions, sometimes in groups, sometimes on a one to one basis to ensure that children's needs are met.

For further information about Phonics, we have attached an information PPT. This page also includes the correct way to enunciate sounds and ways to support your child.