Phonics

At St Catherine’s CofE Primary School we believe reading is an essential component to deepening learning and acquiring knowledge. We want all children to become accurate, fluent and expressive readers who understand every word they read and enjoy it!

Phonics at St Catherine's is taught via whole class and group methods, using Jolly Phonics as the structured synthetics phonetical scheme.  It is taught in a multi-sensory approach with rhymes, actions and picture cues. Phonics is diligently tracked for targeting and where necessary tailored interventions are used. Here is some information about the Jolly Phonics Scheme with some useful resources:

How Jolly Phonics works

Jolly Phonics is a comprehensive programme, based on the proven, fun and multi-sensory synthetic phonics method that gets children reading and writing from an early age. This means that we teach letter sounds as opposed to the alphabet. These 42 letter sounds are phonic building blocks that children, with the right tools, use to decode the English language. When reading a word, they recognise the letters and blend together the respective sounds; when writing a word, they identify the sounds and write down the corresponding letters. These skills are called blending and segmenting. These are two of the five skills that children need to master phonics:

Learning the letter sounds: 

Children are taught 42 letter sounds, which is a mix of alphabet sounds (1 sound – 1 letter) and digraphs (1 sound – 2 letters) such as sh, th, ai and ue.  Using a multi-sensory approach each letter sound is introduced with fun actions, stories and songs. We teach the letter sounds in 7 groups of 6 letters at a pace of 4-5 sounds a week. Children can start reading after the first group of letters have been taught and should have been introduced to all the 42 letter sounds in the first term.

Learning letter formation: 

This is taught alongside the introduction of each letter sound. Typically, children will learn how to form and write the letters letter down during the course of the lesson.

Blending: 

Once the first few letter sounds are learnt, children begin blending the sounds together to help them read and write new words. 

Segmenting: 

When children start reading words, they also need to start identifying the phonic components that make the word sound the way it does. By teaching blending and segmenting at the same time children become familiar with assembling and breaking down the sounds within words.

Tricky words 

These are words with irregular parts, such as ‘who’ and ‘I’. Children learn these as exceptions to the rules of phonics. Introducing the common tricky words early in the year increases reading fluency (as they frequently occur in those first simple sentences you might expect them to read).

Alongside these skills children are also introduced to the main alternative spelling of vowels. These five skills form the foundation that children build on with each year of grammar teaching. 

Below you can view videos developed by Jolly Phonics to demonstrate each of the five key skills: