Stretham Community Primary School
Welcome
Phonics
Stretham Community Primary School
Phonics and Early Reading
At Stretham Community Primary School, we give a high priority to the teaching of phonics as we know that reading is a lifelong skill that unlocks all learning. Our aim is for all pupils to leave our school able to not only read fluently but have a love of reading! Therefore, we are dedicated to ensuring that early reading, through phonics, is taught effectively every day.
We teach a daily phonics lessons in EYFS, KS1 and to some pupils in KS2, following the Twinkl Systematic Synthetic Phonics programme (SSP). It provides a structured approach to learning grapheme-phoneme correspondences (GPCs), which helps children progress from simple sounds to developing more complex knowledge and skills. Alongside the skills of blending (putting sounds together to read) and segmenting (breaking words down to spell them), the children are also taught ‘tricky words’. These are words that cannot be sounded out, such as 'was' or 'me'. They learn to read and to spell these from memory within each level of the programme. The programme ensures there is consistent coverage across all year groups and allows children to make good progress in reading and spelling.
We teach phonics in a multi-sensory way, through mnemonics, actions, handwriting formation rhymes, songs and games to reinforce sound and letter recognition and help children understand how sounds make words and how we use words to make sentences. Children are able to practise their phonics and early reading skills using our fully decodable reading books. These are the Rhino Readers, which match the Twinkl Phonics programme, supplemented by other decodable reading books which correspond with the teaching progression.
For more information about the Twinkl Phonics teaching sequence, please see the attached PowerPoint below.