Phonics at Langtons

Langtons Infant School strives to ensure that every child will leave our school at the end of Year 2 with a love for reading.    Phonics Essential Letters and Sounds (ELS) is our chosen Phonics programme. The aim of ELS is to get all children to read well, quickly. It teaches children to read by identifying the phonemes (the smallest unit of sound) and graphemes (the written version of the sound) within words and using these to read words. Essential Letters and Sounds is a systematic synthetic phonics programme and was validated by the Department for Education in June 2021. 

To ensure all children learn to read well, we teach Phonics from the very start of Nursery.  This is referred to as Phase 1 and includes many elements to foster children’s speaking and listening skills as preparation for learning to read with phonics.

Phase One

Environmental sounds:
• To develop children’s listening skills and awareness of sounds within the environment.
• Further development of vocabulary and children’s identification and recollection of differences between sounds.
• To make up simple sentences and talk in greater detail about sounds.

Instrumental sounds:
• To experience and develop awareness of sounds made with instruments and noise makers.
• To listen to and appreciate the difference between sounds made with instruments.
• To use a wide vocabulary to talk about the sounds instruments make.

Body percussion sounds:
• To develop awareness of sounds and rhythms.
• To distinguish between sounds and to remember patterns of sound.
• To talk about sounds we make with our bodies and what the sounds mean. 

Rhythm and rhyme:
• To experience and appreciate rhythm and rhyme and to develop awareness of
rhythm and rhyme in speech.
• To increase awareness of words that rhyme and to develop knowledge about rhyme.
• To talk about words that rhyme and to produce rhyming words.

Alliteration:
• To develop understanding of alliteration.
• To listen to sounds at the beginning of words and hear the differences between them.
• To explore how different sounds are articulated and extend understanding of alliteration.

Voice sounds:
• To distinguish between the differences in vocal sounds, including oral blending and segmenting.
• To explore speech sounds.
• To talk about the different sounds that we can make with our voices.

Oral blending:
• To develop oral blending and segmenting of sounds and words.
• To listen to phonemes within words and to remember them in the order in which they occur.
• To talk about the different phonemes that make up words

Parents can play a vital role in helping their children develop these skills, by encouraging their children to listen carefully and talk extensively about what they hear, see and do. 

Once these skills are deeply embed the Nursery children will begin to learn Phase 2 GPC's (Grapheme-Phoneme Correspondence).

In Reception phonics is explicitly taught daily with the children developing their knowledge of phases 2- 5.  Phonics has a  dedicated teaching slot on the timetable but is used throughout the day, in other areas of the curriculum.   ELS is a whole-class teaching model. This means that every single pupil has the same opportunities when learning to read. Learning to read well, early, is a priority for every child. Children who may find it harder to learn how to read are given extra support from their teacher every day. We ensure that all children learn to read well and keep up rather than have to catch-up.

Daily Phonics lessons continue in Year 1 and further through the school to ensure all children become confident, fluent readers.  We follow the ELS progression and sequence. This allows our children to practise their existing phonic knowledge whilst building their understanding of the ‘code’ of our language. As a result, children can tackle any unfamiliar words that they might discover.  We teach children more rarely used GPCs through the ELS progression. This means that they can decode and read more words with increased fluency.  ELS is supported by a wide range of fully decodable texts. These cover both fiction and non-fiction and are exciting and engaging for all our pupils. We match the home reading texts to each child’s current phonic knowledge to ensure that they consolidate their most recent teaching and learning at home.
Children experience the joy of books and language whilst rapidly acquiring the skills they need to become fluent independent readers and writers. ELS teaches relevant, useful and ambitious vocabulary to support children’s journey to
becoming fluent and independent readers. At Langtons Infant School we begin by teaching the single letter sounds before moving to diagraphs (two letters spelling one sound), trigraphs (three letters spelling one sound) and quadgraphs (four letters spelling one sound).

We teach children to:

• Decode by identifying each sound within a word and blending them together to read fluently

• Encode by segmenting each sound to write words accurately.

The structure of ELS lessons allows children to know what is coming next, what they need to do, and how to achieve success. This makes it easier for children to learn the GPCs we are teaching (the alphabetic code) and how to apply this when reading.  ELS is designed on the principle that children should ‘keep up’ rather than ‘catch up’. Interventions are delivered within the lesson by the teacher and any child who is struggling with the new knowledge immediately targeted with appropriate support. Where further support is required, 1:1 intervention is used. These interventions are short, specific and effective.  ELS is designed to make use of all the teaching time during the phonics lesson.  Providing targeted support, where required, reduces the need for external interventions meaning that there is minimal disruption to curriculum teaching time.  Where further phonic support is required in Key Stage 2, this is timetabled daily to ensure that any child rapidly catches up. Children are assessed in week 5 of each half term to ensure that any specific gaps can be targeted immediately.  We reinforce the link between reading and writing in every ELS lesson through the independent application of the children’s understanding. We also ensure that all our teachers reference the learning from ELS lessons when writing as part of the wider curriculum.

 Phases Two to Four

• How to represent each of the forty-two sounds by a letter or sequence of letters
• How to blend sounds together for reading and how to segment (split) words for spelling
• The letter names
• How to read and spell some high frequency ‘harder to read or spell word’ words containing sounds not yet learned (for example ‘they’, ‘my’, ‘her’ and ‘you’)

Phase Five

Children learn new ways of representing the sounds and practise blending for reading and segmenting for spelling.

During this phase, children become fluent readers and increasingly accurate spellers.

Statutory phonics screening check

At the end of year one, your child will undergo a statutory phonics screening check. This is a statutory assessment which began in 2012.

All children in year one must take the check and any year two children who did not meet the expected standard in the previous year will take the check again.

The phonics screening check is designed to confirm whether or not individual children have learned phonics decoding to the appropriate standard.

Please read the ELS Parental Information, Getting all children to read well, quickly and The Phonics Screening Check.