02. Phonics

Our aim is to teach children the phonic knowledge and skills they need to become fluent readers by the age of seven. Phonics is taught from Nursery through to Year 2. However, the good practice continues into Year 3.  We integrate phonics and spelling lessons so that all children are confident in their phonic knowledge. Our successful, bespoke approach has been honed over years. Initially, it was based on the Jolly Phonics scheme. Then, we improved it with the guidance from Letters and Sounds. When the National Curriculum was updated, we amended our overview in line with the increased spelling expectations. Recently, we have adapted it further following training on Rosenshine’s principles to increase the efficacy of our approach. The DfE-validated Rocket phonics books are used in line with our phonics teaching. In Reception, the children take home five books each week: 

• Two Rocket Phonics decodable books. (Decodable books are designed to align with explicit, systematic phonics instruction. They are simple stories constructed using almost exclusively words that are phonetically decodable, using letters and letter-groups that children have learned in their phonics lessons.)  
• Two supplementary books  
• One library book to enjoy with a parent   

The two books that are decodable are linked to our weekly phonics teaching. This will enable children to read using the sounds and words that they have been taught in recent lessons, and provides children with the opportunity to consolidate the teaching taking place each week in school. For the vast majority of children these will be the same level based on our teaching progression. If a child has not yet acquired the necessary phonics knowledge to access these then we support them with a tailored selection of books.  

There will be two supplementary books. These enable children to continue to practise developing phonics skills through a more varied selection of books and provide challenge for those that need it. They may need a little more support from parents for occasional tricky words. These are levelled to match children’s reading ability at the time and have been levelled based on word reading skills and comprehension.    

One book will be a library book. This provides children with another opportunity to enjoy a high-quality text and to help develop a love of stories. A photo of the sticker used to identify a library book would be good here – or a graphic from the master.

Children in Y2 take home 2 books a night – one fiction or poetry and one non-fiction. This allows them to change the books when they finish them. Many children are reading chapter books in Y2 and we want to ensure they are able to finish them. It also allows them to start picking books that interest them which encourages their love of reading.

We have visually appealing, well-structured and progressive flipcharts that we use in class, to enable us to deliver high-quality lessons with good pace. These link with our learning of the Barnes high frequency words to ensure a very joined up approach. The words that children are expected to learn to read on sight by the end of key stage one can be found below: 

First 100 words

Second 100 words

Some of these words are decodable such as ‘and’ whereas others are what we term ‘tricky’ (i.e. they are not decodable using phonic knowledge such as ‘one’). Learning these high frequency words enables the children to access texts and reduce the working memory load when approaching an unknown text. 

Our phonics screening results can be found here: 

Pupil outcomes in the phonics screening check continue to be highly impressive. In 2019 only one pupil (a pupil with an Education Health and Care plan) failed to meet the pass mark of 32 out of a possible 40. Here is a link to our phonics overview.