Southborough Primary School use the Little Wandle Letters and Sounds Revised Scheme to plan and provide daily engaging phonics lessons. In phonics, we teach children that the letters of the alphabet represent a different sound, that these can be used in a variety of combinations and are put together to make words. The children learn to recognise all of the different sounds and combinations that they might see when they are reading or writing. Our phonics teaching starts in Reception and follows a very specific sequence that allows our children to build on their previous phonic knowledge and master specific phonic strategies as they move through school. At Southborough Primary School we also model these strategies in shared reading and writing both inside and outside of the phonics lesson and across the curriculum. We have a strong focus on the development of language skills for our children because we know that speaking and listening are crucial skills for reading and writing in all subjects.

What are phonics?

Phonics: a method of teaching people to read by correlating sounds with symbols in an alphabetic writing system.

Vocabulary

Phoneme: the sound the letters make.

Grapheme: the letters or letters used to write the phoneme.

Digraph: a 2 letter grapheme. For example, ch, sh, th, ng, ai.

Trigraph: a 3 letter grapheme. For example, igh, ear, air

Split vowel digraph: A two letter grapheme that represent a vowel phoneme or sound where the sounds are pushed apart by another letter. This digraph often used to be referred to as a magic e. For example, kite, cake, phone, these, cube.

Blending: Building words for reading by pushing together all the phonemes or sounds in the word.

Segmenting: Splitting up words for spelling by breaking up words into all their sounds and then working out what letter or letters are needed to represent each sound.