Phonics

At St Paul’s, Phonics is taught daily to all children in Reception and Key Stage 1 (and, sometimes, in Year 3, too).  We use the Twinkl programme to teach children the letters of the alphabet and their matching sounds.  

What is Phonics?

Phonics is a way of teaching children to read quickly and skilfully. Children are taught how to:

* Recognise the sounds (phonemes) that written letters (graphemes) make

* Identify the sounds that different combinations of letters make - such as 'sh' (two letters = digraph) and 'igh' (three letters = trigraph)

* Blend these sounds together from left to right to make a word.

Children can then use this knowledge to decode new words that they hear or see. This is the first important step in learning to read.

The children are taught to read words by blending, which means pushing all the sounds together to make a word.  The children are taught to spell words by segmenting, which means sounding out words and writing down the sounds they can hear.

At St Paul’s, at the end of Reception, children are expected to be secure in Level 3 and have experienced Level 4. By the end of Year 1 children are expected to be secure in Level 5.