Phonics
At Meole Brace Primary School and Nursery, we prioritise delivering a comprehensive and engaging phonics programme, using the DfE approved scheme Bug Club Phonics to underpin the structure, routine and progression of our teaching.
The Bug Club Phonics programme is centred around an accessible and inclusive teaching approach, providing a fully resourced Systematic Synthetic Phonics programme based on a proven progression. This enables our children to not only develop their academic ability to read and write, but also fosters positive attitudes in both of these areas, motivating reluctant readers and writers and boosting children’s confidence and enjoyment right from the beginning of their learning journey. Phonics sessions also provide invaluable opportunities to develop our children’s early language skills, giving them a solid foundation for the development of their Oracy skills and ensuring that they have all the tools they need to become effective and proficient communicators.
Phonics in action
Within daily phonics lessons across EYFS and Key Stage 1, children develop their listening skills and learn to recognise and pronounce the sounds that a letter or groups of letters make. They build their knowledge carefully over time to allow them to apply their phonic knowledge to blend sounds to read and segment sounds to spell.
Underpinned by the teaching sequence of Letters and Sounds, phonics lessons are structured in the same way every day with an introduction, revisit, teach, practise and apply element to each session. This provides the children with a consistent routine that they become familiar with, thus supporting their ability to retrieve, recall and apply their phonic knowledge. As well as activities for blending for reading and segmenting for spelling, language sessions also teach ‘tricky’ common irregular words. Any new vocabulary encountered is unpicked, with focussed time given to developing children’s understanding of language and to orally rehearse and apply this in a range of contexts. Oracy components of:
- Learning to talk, listen and communicate
- Learning through talk, listening and communication
- Learning about talk, listening and communication
underpin all elements of our phonics teaching, providing our children with rich opportunities to hone and practise these skills alongside their developing phonic knowledge.
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decodable books. |
record each phoneme with its corresponding grapheme. |
Our rich and engaging learning environments reflect the importance of phonics as a fundamental tool in successful reading and writing, with a range of resources available to children at all points of the school day to aide recall and support application. Learning walls include continually developing phonic word banks and visual prompts, sound mats, irregular word mats and letter formation prompts are accessible to all children at all times.
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Putting the children first
Our teachers work tirelessly to implement a multi-sensory approach in the teaching and learning of phonics, adapting teaching and supplementing the provided Bug Club materials with a range of visual, audio, oral and kinaesthetic activities and resources. This enables the children to secure and embed the taught knowledge and skills in a range of meaningful contexts, thus increasing fluency, confidence and engagement.
Through careful and continuous assessment, teachers are quick to identify any gaps and respond to the needs of any key groups of children, adapting day to day planning as required and providing timely and effective intervention to close the gap and support all children in achieving their potential. This careful monitoring continues into Key Stage 2, with targeted intervention in place to ensure that children with any continuing gaps in their phonic knowledge are supported in consolidating and developing their ability to recall and apply the alphabetic code.
their phonic knoweldge, building fluency and confidence.
Decodable Books and Texts for Children to Read
As well as saying sounds, spelling words using magnetic letters and practising the formation of letters, it is vital that children have access to ‘decodable’ books so they can consolidate the knowledge learnt in each phonics session and develop their blending skills. The Bug Club Phonics reading books we use, alongside our phonics teaching, link directly to the order in which grapheme-phoneme correspondences are introduced in the classroom. These books are fully decodable, meaning every word in the book can be read using just the children’s developing phonic knowledge. Books sent home each week will match tightly to the sounds covered in lessons, not only enabling the children to embed and secure their phonic knowledge, but also allowing them to experience success and build their confidence, motivation and enthusiasm for reading. Children can also log-in online to access Bug Club Phonics eBooks and digital games selected for them by their teachers.
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These are allocated by class teachers and allow them to practise and consolidate the phonemes
and graphemes taught in school.
What this means for our children
Our comprehensive and adaptive approach to phonics teaching and learning at Meole Brace means we provide our children with the fundamental tools they need to develop into fluent, confident and passionate readers, writers and communicators.
together at our EYFS and Year 1 Reading and Phonics workshop.
Please explore the English Curriculum pages for further information on Reading, Writing and Oracy or click on the link below for more information on how you can support your child with phonics at home.
