At St. Bede’s Catholic Primary School, we recognise that being able to read is one of the most important skills children will learn during their early schooling.  This has far-reaching implications for lifelong confidence and well-being.

High-quality structured and systematic teaching of phonics is at the heart of early education at St Bede’s.  Daily phonics lessons ensure the vital skills of word recognition are taught, enabling children to become fluent readers.  Once achieved, pupils are then able to concentrate on the meaning of the text and make the shift from learning to read to reading to learn.  Reading is an essential skill to allow children to fully access the world around them.

At St Bede’s, we follow the Sounds-Write programme of teaching phonics.  Sounds-Write is a linguistic phonic approach to teaching reading, which begins with the sounds in the language and moves from sounds to the written word. aiming to ensure that all children are fluent readers by the time they leave KS1.  This is an entitlement we want to achieve for every child.  Our reading scheme in Reception and Year One is entirely decodable, using Sounds-Write texts and Phonics Dandelion Readers.  In Year Two, children will have sufficient phonic knowledge to read more complex texts and can progress to free reading.

Phonics and Spelling

The Sounds-Write programme is used to teach phonics and spelling.  In Nursery, the children are taught an awareness of sound and sound identification (environmental, instrumental and body percussion), moving onto accessing the initial code of the Sounds-Write programme by half term of the Spring term.   All pupils in Reception begin the initial code in the September of their Reception year and continue their phonics journey throughout Year One and into Year Two, with the aim of leaving KS1 as fluent readers, secure in word building and recognition.

Sounds-Write is a strong phonemic awareness instructional programme, developing three phonemic awareness skills: blending, segmenting and phoneme manipulation.

Conceptual Knowledge and Understanding

The programme is based around the conceptual understanding needed to make sense of the process of learning to read and write.  Pupils are taught the 4 concepts below:

1. Letters are symbols (spellings) used to represent individual sounds in speech
2. A sound may be spelled by 1, 2, 3 or 4 letters – dog, street, night, dough
3. The same sound can be spelled in more than one way (one sound – different spellings) – rain, break, gate and stay.
4. Many spellings can represent more than one sound (one spelling – different sounds) – head, seat, break.

Skills

Pupils are taught the 3 skills segmenting, blending and phoneme manipulation which need to be practised and perfected to become a fluent reader:

1. Blending – pushing sounds together to build words, e.g. /s/ /a/ /t/ à sat
2. Segmenting individual sounds in speech to read and write (pulling apart the individual sounds in words), e.g. pig à /p/ /i/ /g/
3. Phoneme manipulation – manipulating individual sounds (inserting sounds into and deleting sounds from words) to enable one sound to be replaced by another (sound swapping). This skill is important to test alternatives for spellings that represent more than one sound.

Alphabet code knowledge

To become a fluent reader, pupils must be taught all the common ways of representing English speech sounds (phonemes).  Sounds-write uses a systematic approach, teaching simple 1-sound:1-letter correspondence (Initial Code) to teaching sounds represented by several different spellings (Extended Code).

 

All adults involved in teaching phonics have attended a 4-day training programme on the delivery of Sounds-Write and use the same language consistently when teaching about sounds and spellings.

Progress in phonics is monitored half termly, including lesson visits and pupil progress discussions and is tracked using Phonics Tracker.

Pupils in EYFS and KS1 are given additional support as required to master their phonics.  Pupils in KS2, who have gaps in the phonics, continue to be supported through timely and effective intervention and decodable readers for older pupils.

Sounds-Write (lessons 11 – 15) is used in the teaching of weekly polysyllabic spellings in KS2 alongside Spelling Shed.