At St Joseph’s, we are committed to ensuring the curriculum is broad, balanced and purposeful. We recognise that we are building the foundations for life-long learning with Christ at the centre. A shared love of literature throughout school and our faith life and Gospel values, Trust Character Virtues and British Values, sits alongside our curriculum. We want the children to understand their place within their local community, their country and in their world as a global citizen; to have experiences that become part of their life story; and aspire to achieve their very best, having been shown that there is a world of possibility awaiting them, outside of the school gates.
Intent
We believe that phonics provides the foundations of learning to make the development into fluent reading, spelling and writing easier. The teaching of phonics is of the highest priority.
Implementation
At St Joseph’s we use the Sounds-Write phonics programme to teach our children to read, spell and write. All teaching and support staff have participated in 4 days of Sounds-Write training in order to deliver the programme effectively.
Beginning in Autumn term in Reception, children are taught phonics daily for 30 minutes, this continues until the end of KS1.
The Sounds-Write programme begins with what all children know from a very early age – the sounds of their own language. It then moves to carefully sequenced, incremental steps to teach the sounds in the English language and how they can be spelt.
In EYFS children will be introduced to the Initial Code. During KS1 children will continue following the systematic phonics teaching and learn the Extended Code looking at ‘same sounds different spelling’ and ‘same spelling different sounds.’
Sounds-Write teaches children that:
- Letters are symbols (spellings) that represent sounds
- Each sound may be represented (spelled) by a 1, 2, 3 or 4-letter spelling
- The same sound can be spelled in more than one way (goat, slow, note, toe, over)
- Many spellings represent more than one sound (ea in read and bread)
The following skills are taught throughout the Sounds-Write program:
- Blending – the ability to push sounds together to build words (c-a-t = cat)
- Segmenting – the ability to pull apart the individual sounds in words (pig = p-i-g)
- Phoneme manipulation – the ability to insert sounds into words and delete sounds out of words. This skill is necessary to test out alternatives for spellings that represent more than one sound.
Children are continually formatively assessed throughout phonic sessions, ‘intervention’ sessions are delivered by both teachers and teaching assistants to support children who are not on track.
At the end of Year 1 children take the statutory Phonic Screening Check, this shows how well children can use the phonics skills they've learned. Any children who do not pass this test have small group interventions to continue and review their phonics journey in year 2 and beyond where needed.
Impact
Children will become confident readers, spellers and writers.