At Avonmouth C of E Primary School and Nursery we use Little Wandle as our chosen Systematic Synthetic Phonics programme. 

Supporting children at home with their phonics learning is key to their success. Please follow the link to the programme for support

https://www.littlewandlelettersandsounds.org.uk/resources/for-parents/

Phonics teaching and learning at Avonmouth CE Primary

The foundations for phonics learning begin in Nursery class. One of the most important aspects of this is developing an awareness of sound, through activities that develop focused listening and attention, including oral blending.

Children in EYFS and Key Stage 1 have daily phonics lessons of between 20 and 30 minutes. In these lessons we might do a combination of:

· Learning new sounds (phonemes) and the letters that make these sounds (graphemes). We start with the single-letter graphemes (s, a, t, p, i, n, d…) and then move on to double-letter graphemes (sh, th, oo, oi, …) which are the digraphs; then the three-letter graphemes (igh, air, ear, …) which are the trigraphs. This is like recognising the ‘jigsaw pieces’ of the reading code that children are taught to put together (blending) to read whole words and sentences.

· Review and revisit known sounds: learning to ‘blend’ these sounds to read whole words.

· Learn and practise tricky words. These are words that can not be easily phonetically-decodable or have a tricky part (eg: said, my, oh, people, …). Children are taught to read these words on sight. It is essential that children build up their sight vocabulary of words so that they can learn to read words instantly without the need to decode each word and so develop fluency of reading.

· Practising and applying: reading words and later sentences with our known phonemes/ graphemes. Spelling words with these graphemes and tricky words.

Assessment

We constantly assess children’s ability in our daily phonics lessons and use of flash cards in points throughout the day. Children are also formally assessed at the end of each term. This enables us to match your child to their correct level of decodable reading book and highlights any gaps in their phonic knowledge. These gaps are quickly addressed through phonics catch-up and keep-up sessions.

Towards the end of Year 1 your child’s teacher will carry out a national assessment called the Phonics Screening Check. We will give you more information about this when your child is mid-way through Year 1.