Phonics

Meet our Phonics co-ordinator, Mrs Wright

Phonics at Alresford Primary School

Alresford Primary School follow their own phonics programme; teachers have collaborated to design a phonics programme which works for Alresford Primary School and for our children.  Our phonics programme is structured, engaging and ensures progression, it also allows for creativity and a teacher’s professional judgement to be used daily.  This ensures the children are making their best progress possible and reaching their potential.  Our phonics lessons are effective and demonstrate high quality teaching and learning.

Discrete phonics lessons take place daily across Reception and Key Stage 1. They follow the structure of ‘Review, Teach, Practice, Apply’ to ensure that children are consolidating phonic knowledge and skills over time and that they are able to apply them in context. Additionally, links between phonics knowledge and understanding are made continuously in both reading and writing lessons and where appropriate across other curricular areas.

Phonics lessons proceed at pace and incorporate a wide range of practical and interactive activities to engage all the children. These activities are carefully chosen to ensure that children develop their skills in aural discrimination and phonemic and rhyme awareness, blending and segmenting as well as grapheme-phoneme correspondence. Sounds taught are ‘pure’ ie b not ‘buh’ as this is central to phonics teaching and ability to recognise sounds in words. During teaching pupils are seated where they can clearly see the adult’s mouth in order to learn the correct pronunciation of sounds.

During phonics lessons, there is also a focus on developing fluency with reading.  Children will be regularly exposed to the same words and will read and re-read sentences together as a class.  Echo and choral reading strategies are used to support this.  This also allows prosody (reading with expression) to be continuously modelled and children to develop this skill.

Our aim is for children to be secure in phase 2 and 3 phonics by the end of Reception. By the end of Year 2, the expectation is that most children will be secure at phase 5.  Year 2 children transition from our phonics programme to No Nonsense Spelling and whole class reading lessons, in line with KS2.  No Nonsense spelling teaches the spelling for year 2 as well as recapping all of phase 5 phonics.  

Overviews of the Alresford Primary phonics programme

Alresford Primary phonics policy