PHONICS

How do we teach phonics at East Coker School?

Children at East Coker get off to a flying start as, from the moment the children arrive in Reception, they are taught phonics using the Read Write Inc (RWI) programme. Phonics is a way of teaching children to read and write by blending and segmenting individual sounds.

Throughout Reception and Key Stage 1, the children take part in daily RWI sessions. These sessions focus on teaching the children key reading skills and how to spell by segmenting the sounds in a word. We also teach the children to read and write 'tricky words'. These are words that you cannot sound out and children are expected to remember how to read and write them.

Children are taught in small focussed groups according to their ability. Progress and attainment is regularly assessed.

During our RWI sessions, the children will:

Learn the 44 sounds and their corresponding letters or letter groups
Learn to write the letter groups which represent the 44 sounds
Read words using ‘Fred Talk’ and learn to write them by saying the sounds
Read lively stories featuring words that they have learnt to sound out
Learn to write simple sentences
Develop their comprehension skills by answering questions about the stories that they have read

Key terms we use in our teaching:

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

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

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

Phoneme – a single unit of sound

Grapheme – a written letter, or group of letters 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

Blend – to put or merge the sounds together to make a word (e.g. the sounds d-o-g are blended into 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 buttons – ways of visually isolating different sounds in a word. We use a dot under letters where one letter makes one sound and a line underneath digraphs or trigraphs.

Phonics Screening Check

Towards the end of Year 1, children are required to take part in the Government's National Phonics Screening Check. This is a quick and easy check of the children's phonic knowledge, that helps to confirm whether your child has made the expected progress. The check will be carried out by the class teacher and should take approximately ten minutes.

More information can be found by clicking on the link below.