Phonics

Intent:

At Fordingbridge Federation we are passionate about ensuring all children become confident and enthusiastic readers and writers. We believe that phonics provides the foundations of learning to make the development into fluent reading and writing easier. Through phonics children learn to segment words to support their spelling ability and blend sounds to read words. The teaching of phonics is of high priority to create confident readers of any age.

Aims:

• To use high quality resources which excite the children and encourage them to retain the phonemes and apply to challenging words.
• To create an environment and curriculum where phonics is demonstrated and applied throughout children’s learning.
• To ensure children are confident with their grapheme, phoneme correspondence knowledge and that they can apply segmenting and blending to ensure they are able to read words which they have never come across before.
• To implement Monster Phonics scheme where needed throughout KS2.

Implementation:

At Fordingbridge Federation, we use the DFE approved Monster Phonics scheme for children in Reception and Key Stage 1 and 2. The resources are mapped against the Letters and Sounds phases 1-6 and the Spelling Curriculum.

The colour-coded grapheme system is unique to Monster Phonics, each coloured grapheme is paired with a monster character that makes the same sound to give audio-visual prompts that help children ‘see’ each sound within a word and pronounce it correctly. The monsters are really sound cues to help the children remember how to read and pronounce graphemes.

Implementation at KS1:

As children move through Reception and into KS1, they continue to build on their listening skills and are introduced to Phase 2 which marks the start of systematic phonics work. They have discrete, daily phonics sessions where they revise previous learning, are taught new graphemes/phonemes, practise together and apply what they have learnt. Through their phonics training, they are taught the 44 phonemes that make up all the sounds that are required for reading and spelling. These phonemes include those made by just one letter, for example, ‘c’ as in ’cat’ and but also those that are made by two or more: ‘ng as in ‘strong’ and ‘igh’ as in ‘light’.

Children work through the different phases and as they grow in confidence and experience, they are introduced to alternative ways of representing the same sound, for example, ‘ai’ as in ‘rain’, ‘ay’ as in ‘day’ and ‘a-e’ as in ‘make’.

Implementation at KS2:

Through the teaching of Monster Phonics the children continue to be taught the essential skills needed for reading according to their individual needs. Phonics phase 5 and 6 is revisited and taught daily in Year 3 alongside the Year 3 curriculum. Children who did not pass the phonics test in Year 2 receive additional intervention using the monster phonics scheme. In other Year groups extra support is provided in the form of planned interventions for those children who are working below expected levels. Staff systematically teach learners the relationship between sounds and the written spelling patterns, or graphemes, which represent them. Pupils have regular reading sessions with an adult to ensure the pupils are regularly practising and applying their phonics knowledge. Teachers regularly assess the pupil’s phonics knowledge using the planned Monster Phonics assessments.

Impact:

To measure impact we will ask: What impact has the implementation had on:

*The ability to use recall phonemes with good grapheme, phoneme correspondence

*The ability to segment and blend confidently with real and nonsense words

*The ability to apply phonics skills fluently when reading

*The coverage of phonemes

*The ability to apply their phonics skills and apply to other areas of the curriculum.

A Phonetic skill or phoneme is mastered when the children are able to read confidently and apply the phoneme in a range of words, unaided. The children should be able to apply the sound and their segmenting and blending to a range of real and nonsense words. This will be assessed through assessment, tracking, pupil progress meetings, performance management, moderation and standardisation.

How does Monster Phonics work?

At Fordingbridge Federation, we believe that providing engaging, fun and interactive phonics lessons is the key to successful and enthusiastic readers and writers. We have adopted the Monster Phonics scheme that uses fun characters to help the children engage with their learning, make connections and as a result make rapid progress with both their reading and writing. Each lesson focuses on a new phoneme (sound) whilst recapping and revisiting those previously taught. Lessons are based around a variety of games and tasks that help the children to engage and embed new learning into the long-term memory. Learn more about Monster Phonics below.

What is Monster Phonics?

• The 26 letters of the alphabet and combinations of these letters make 44 speech sounds in English.
• The 44 sounds (phonemes) are spelt by 144 different letter combinations (graphemes). For example, the sound A is spelt 5 different ways ay (play), ai (train).
• Traditional ways of learning to spell can be time-consuming and for some children they are ineffective.
• Monster Phonics categorises sounds into 10 areas and uses the Monsters as a categorisation. Each monster has a different colour. That colour represents that way of spelling the sound.

Why does Monster Phonics improve learning?

• The children learn through the assignment of colour and the linkage of the sound, as well as seeing the colour, creating more ways of remembering the spelling.
• The games, songs and activities within the programme continuously reflect this way of learning, so that structure is constantly seen, heard and experienced by the children. This consistency is critical in ensuring that a complicated language is learnt in the most simplistic way.
• High-frequency words are learnt much faster with Monster Phonics. These words make up 65% of the words used in reading
• The colour-coded grapheme system is unique to Monster Phonics; each coloured grapheme is paired with a monster character that makes the same sound to give audio-visual prompts that help children ‘see’ each sound within a word and pronounce it correctly. Our monsters are really sound cues to help children remember how to read and pronounce graphemes

Monster Phonics Actions

This video teaches the actions for each of the long vowel sounds, the tricky letters, the silent letters and the phonetic letters. Free trial at https://monsterphonics.com/ Phonics is fun and engaging with Monster Phonics. It is easier to teach and easier to learn.

Pure Speech Sounds 

Use this video to teach the initial pure speech sounds. Monster Phonics has been designed by teachers for teachers, supported by a range of comprehensive resources and phonics books that meet the criteria of the Ofsted Primary Framework. The programme offers a systematic multi-sensory way to teach phonics allowing children to advance more quickly.

Phase 1

In this phase children learn to recognise sounds, begin to identify them around them and also develop their speaking and listening skills. The emphasis is to get children attuned to the sounds around them and ready to begin developing oral blending and segmenting skills.

Encourage your child to recognise sounds around them e.g. telephone, listening to the rain or wind, making animal noises, playing instruments, guessing the source of the sound (e.g. what makes the ‘bzzzzzz’ sound? A bee.)

Phase 2

In Phase 2, letters and their sounds are introduced one at a time. A set of letters is taught each week, in the following sequence:

Set 1: s, a, t, p

Set 2: i, n, m, d

Set 3: g, o, c, k

Set 4: ck, e, u, r

Set 5: h, b, f, ff, l, ll, ss

The children will begin to learn to blend and segment to help begin reading and spelling. This will begin with simple words e.g. at, sat, pat, pin.

Phase 3

By Phase 3 children will be able to blend and segment words taught with letters in Phase 2. Children will be taught a combination of constant and vowel digraphs and trigraphs.

Set 6: j, v, w, x

Set 7: y, z, zz, qu

Consonant digraphs: ch, sh, th, ng

Vowel digraphs: ai, ee, igh, oa, oo (book), oo (boot), ar, or, ur, ow, oi, ear, air, ure, er

Phase 2 & 3 Actions and Sounds Videos

Phase 4

This phase consolidates phases 1, 2 and 3. Children will be able to make links between phonemes and graphemes with confidence. They will blend phonemes to read CVC (consonant, vowel, consonant) words and segment CVC words for spelling.

Phase 5

In this phase children will broaden their knowledge of letters and sounds. They will learn new graphemes and alternative pronunciations for these and graphemes they already know. They also learn about the split digraphs.

New graphemes for Reading: ay, ou, ie, ea, oy, ir, ue, aw, wh, ph, ew, oe, au,

Split digraphs: a_e, e_e, i_e, o_e, u_e

Phase 6

During this phase children become fluent readers and increasingly accurate spellers. This phase covers spellings and learning rules for spelling alternatives and homophones.

Children look at syllables, base words, analogy and mnemonics as aids to spelling correctly. Children learn to add a range of suffixes to words following spelling rules.

Suffixes: - ful, -ly, -y, -ment, -ness, -ing, -ed, -s, -es, -est, -er, -tion

Alternative Sounds (the same letter (grapheme) can represent more than one sound (phoneme)):

fin/find, hot/cold, cat/cent, got/giant, but/put, cow/blow, tie/field, eat/bread, farmer/her, hat/what, yes/by/very, chin/school/chef, out/shoulder/could/you.

Tricky Words

In each phase, children are also introduced to tricky words. These are the words that are irregular and that can’t be read usually the ‘normal’ decoding and blending taught. This means that phonics cannot be applied to the reading and spelling of these words. All children should be able to read and spell these words independently by the end of Year 1.

Common Exception Words

Children will also be taught what are now referred to as 'common exception words' (sometimes called tricky words). These are words commonly found in the English language, but which do not follow the phonic rules that have been taught so far. All children should be able to read and spell these words independently.

What is the Phonics Screening Check?

The phonics screening check is a quick and easy check of your child’s phonics knowledge. It helps the school confirm whether your child has made the expected progress.

What are ‘non/pseudo-words’?

The check will contain a mix of real words and ‘non-words’ or ‘pseudo-words’ (or ‘nonsense/alien words’). Children will be told before the check that there will be non-words that he or she will not have seen before. Many children will be familiar with this because many schools already use ‘non-words’ when they teach phonics. Non-words are important to include because words such as ‘vap’ or ‘jound’ are new to all children. Children cannot read the non-words by using their memory or vocabulary; they have to use their decoding skills. This is a fair way to assess their ability to decode.

After the check

The school will tell you about your child’s progress in phonics and how he or she has done in the screening check at the end of Year 1.

If your child has found the check difficult, your child’s school should also tell you what support they have put in place to help him or her improve. You might like to ask how you can support your child to take the next step in reading.

Children who have not met the standard in Year 1 will retake the check in Year 2. All children are individuals and develop at different rates. The screening check ensures that teachers understand which children need extra help with phonic decoding.