Phonics:

Essential Letters and Sounds

At St Columba’s, as part of a broad and balanced curriculum, phonics runs alongside other teaching methods to help children develop vital reading and writing knowledge and skills. We hope to give them a real love of literacy to enable pupils to reach their full potential and succeed in life.

Early reading skills are taught by delivering our chosen validated Systematic Synthetic Phonics (SSP), Essential Letters & Sounds (ELS), which fulfils the National Curriculum requirements. ELS provides pupils with a multi-sensory approach, which accommodates all learning styles and meets the needs of all our pupils. 

We believe that phonics is the first strategy that children should be taught in helping them learn to read and become independent writers. The teaching of phonics is delivered using coherently planned and sequenced lessons to allow for sufficient progression. As reading and writing are both important keys to learning, we teach phonics clearly and systematically in highly structured and ambitious daily lessons, learning the initial sounds first before progressing to exploring all of the different ways that sounds can be made in the English language!

The children are taught as a whole class, but may receive additional intervention to enable some pupils to 'keep up rather than catch up'.  In some cases, the scheme is adapted to meet the needs of individual pupils. The phonemes (sounds) are systematically taught before the children are shown how to blend them for reading and segment them for writing. Alongside this, the children are taught to read and spell 'harder and read and spell words (HRSW)'.

Systematic Synthetic Phonics (SSP) Scheme - Essential Letters & Sounds

Essential Letters and Sounds (ELS) is our chosen Phonics programme. The aim of ELS is ‘getting all children to read well, quickly’. It teaches children to read by identifying the phonemes (the smallest unit of sound) and graphemes (the written version of the sound) within words and using these to read words.

Children begin learning Phonics at the very beginning of Reception and it is explicitly taught every day during a dedicated slot on the timetable. Children are given the knowledge and the skills to then apply this independently. In addition, children who attend our Nursery are taught a sound a week (Spring & Summer terms prior to joining Reception) .

Throughout the day, children will use their growing Phonics knowledge to support them in other areas of the curriculum and will have many opportunities to practise their reading. This includes reading 1:1 with a member of staff, with a partner during paired reading and as a class. 

Children continue daily Phonics lessons in Year 1 and further through the school to ensure all children become confident, fluent readers.

We follow the ELS progression and sequence. This allows our children to practise their existing phonic knowledge whilst building their understanding of the ‘code’ of our language GPCs (Grapheme Phoneme Correspondence). As a result, our children can tackle any unfamiliar words that they might discover. 

Children experience the joy of books and language whilst rapidly acquiring the skills they need to become fluent independent readers and writers. ELS teaches relevant, useful and ambitious vocabulary to support each child’s journey to becoming fluent and independent readers.

We begin by teaching the single letter sounds before moving to diagraphs ‘sh’ (two letters spelling one sound), trigraphs ‘igh’ (three letters spelling one sound) and quadgraphs ‘eigh’ (four letters spelling one sound).

We teach children to:

• Decode (read) by identifying each sound within a word and blending them together to read fluently
• Encode (write) by segmenting each sound to write words accurately.                                                                

The structure of ELS lessons allows children to know what is coming next, what they need to do, and how to achieve success. This makes it easier for children to learn the GPCs we are teaching (the alphabetic code) and how to apply this when reading.

ELS is designed on the principle that children should ‘keep up’ rather than ‘catch up’. Since interventions are delivered within the lesson by the teacher, any child who is struggling with the new knowledge can be immediately targeted with appropriate support. Where further support is required, 1:1 interventions are used where needed. These interventions are short, specific and effective.

Progression

This document below summaries the learning progression of Phase 2 to Phase 5 sounds, high frequency words, tricky words and spellings at St Columba's.

Assessment

At St Columba's we use Phonics Tracker, which is fully aligned to the ELS progression and sequence, to assess our pupils. The assessment is in real-time, capturing results and allows us to focus on our pupils' individual needs. Phonics Tracker allows us to assess pupils on GPC and words (including pseudo words). In addition, in Year 1, we assess children against the Phonics Screening Check to ensure they are on track and targeted support can be provided.

Assessment of the children’s reading skills is key to ensuring that all children make rapid progress though the programme, and that they keep up rather than catch up. Using the assessment cycle alongside our daily in-class assessments will ensure that all the Reading Teachers know where every child is in their early reading journey. ELS is designed to remove the likelihood of ‘gaps’ in children’s knowledge occurring, to avoid children falling behind and to ensure rapid progress where children are transferring their decoding and encoding skills to reading and writing.

Assessment occurs in the fifth week of each half term, to allow all members of staff to target and close any gaps that may be present in either sound knowledge or reading skills. Undertaking assessment in the fifth week will enable us to action a direct intervention before any upcoming school holidays. ELS includes specific revision points throughout the programme. Each of these revision points focus on specific skills to support children’s rapid movement through the programme, the consolidation of their understanding and the re-activation of knowledge.

Information for Parents

What is Phonics?

Supporting Reading at Home:

• Children will only read books that are entirely decodable, this means that they should be able to read these books as they already know the code contained within the book.
• We only use pure sounds when decoding words (no ‘uh’ after the sound)
• We want children to practise reading their book 4 times across the week working on these skills:

               Decode – sounding out and blending to read the word.

               Fluency – reading words with less obvious decoding.

               Expression – using intonation and expression to bring the text to life!

We must use pure sounds when we are pronouncing the sounds and supporting children in reading words. If we mispronounce these sounds, we will make reading harder for our children. Please watch the videos below for how to accurately pronounce these sounds.

Children are sometimes given Oxford Reading Tree books for additional reading.

At the beginning of each academic year, we will hold an information session for parents and carers to find out more about what we do for Phonics, Reading and English in our school.

For further support or more information about our phonics programme please follow the link below:

Pronunciation videos for supporting your child at home:

The school’s Phonics Scheme is ‘Essential Letters and Sounds (ELS)’, these video links will help you to help your child with the correct pronunciation.