English Curriculum
Phonics
At Garrett Hall Primary School we use the Letters and Sounds Phonics Programme for all of our phonics teaching.
Letters and Sounds is a phonics resource published by the Department for Education and Skills in 2007. It aims to build children's speaking and listening skills in their own right as well as to prepare children for learning to read by developing their phonic knowledge and skills. It sets out a detailed and systematic programme for teaching phonic skills for children starting by the age of five, with the aim of them becoming fluent readers by age seven.
There are six overlapping phases. The table below is a summary based on the Letters and Sounds guidance for Practioners and Teachers. For more detailed information, visit the Letters and Sounds website.
Phase | Year Group | Phonic Knowledge & Skills |
Phase One |
Nursery/Reception | Activities are divided into seven aspects, including environmental sounds, instrumental sounds, body sounds, rhythm and rhyme, alliteration, voice sounds and finally oral blending and segmenting. |
Phase Two | Reception | Learning 19 letters of the alphabet and one sound for each. Blending sounds together to make words. Segmenting words into their separate sounds. Beginning to read simple captions. |
Phase Three |
Reception | The remaining 7 letters of the alphabet, one sound for each. Graphemes such as ch, oo, th representing the remaining phonemes not covered by single letters. Reading captions, sentences and questions. On completion of this phase, children will have learnt the "simple code", i.e. one grapheme for each phoneme in the English language. |
Phase Four |
Reception | No new grapheme-phoneme correspondences are taught in this phase. Children learn to blend and segent longer words with adjacet consonants, e.g. swim, clap, jump. |
Phase Five |
Year 1 | Now we move on to the "complex code". Children learn more graphemes for the phonemes which they already know, plus different ways of pronouncing the graphemes they already know. |
Visit the Department for Education and Skills website to view the 'Letters and Sounds - Principles and Practice of High Quality Phonics' documentation.
At the end of year 1 all children will sit a phonics screening test. You can access some sample papers at the links below:
Reading
At Garrett hall we use a wide range of reading schemes to give a broad selection of texts from which the children can select a book that they would like to take home.