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. The school follows the government published programme ‘Letters and Sounds’ to teach phonics. Phonics is divided into six phases, each phase building on the skills and knowledge of the previous phase as follows:
Phase One
The aim of this Phase is to foster children’s speaking and listening skills as preparation for learning to read with phonics. 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.
Phases Two to Four
Phase Two is when systematic, high quality phonic work begins. During Phases Two to Four, children learn:
- 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 ‘tricky’ words containing sounds not yet learned (for example ‘they’, ‘my’, ‘her’ and ‘you’)
The Letters and Sounds Programme we use suggests an order for teaching the letters. We recognise, however, that children’s personal experience of letters varies enormously. Most importantly, we ensure that phonics is taught and practised at a pace that is suitable for individual and groups of children.
Phase Five
Children learn new ways of representing the sounds and practise blending for reading and segmenting for spelling.
Phase Six
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.