Phonics
Phonics at Grove Park Primary School
At Grove Park we have developed our own highly effective and successful Systematic Synthetics Phonics (SSP) programme which includes appropriate resources, has decodable books matched to pupils’ phonic knowledge and high-quality staff training. Our approach is rigorous, systematic and used with fidelity. It is sustainable and works for all children, including the most disadvantaged. Our SSP ensures that we consistently achieve strong phonics results for our pupils.
Grove Park’s complete SSP programme provides:
- All that’s essential to teach SSP to children in the reception and key stage 1 years of mainstream primary schools;
- Sufficient support for children in Reception and Key Stage 1 to become fluent readers;
- A structured route for most children to meet or exceed the expected standard in the year one phonics screening check;
- All national curriculum expectations for word reading through decoding by the end of Key stage 1.
A session is a daily 20-minute structured lesson, where the children have the opportunity to practice reading and writing.
Our programme is split into 6 phases. These are expected to be taught and revisited during the following years:
Phase 1 – Nursery
Phase 2, 3, 4 – Reception
Phase 3, 4, 5 – Year 1
Phase 5, 6 – Year 2
At each phase children are taught to recognise individual sounds, digraphs, trigraphs and clusters of letters. In phonic sessions children are taught to recognise letters, understand the sound they make and then blend them together to create words. Some words, which cannot be phonetically sounded out, are taught at each phase. These are ‘tricky words’ and are taught through sight recognition.
Phonics at Home
There are many great websites and apps to help support phonics learning at home. Here are some of our favourites used in school:
www.phonicsplay.co.uk – Buried Treasure, Dragons Den, Obb and Bob
Twinkl app
Phonics Vocabulary
Phoneme - The smallest unit of sound. There are approximately 44 phonemes in English (it depends on different accents). Phonemes can be put together to make words.
Grapheme - A way of writing down a phoneme. Graphemes can be made up from 1 letter e.g. p, 2 letters e.g. sh, 3 letters e.g. tch or 4 letters e.g ough.
GPC - This is short for Grapheme Phoneme Correspondence. Knowing a GPC means being able to match a phoneme to a grapheme and vice versa.
Digraph - A grapheme containing two letters that makes just one sound (phoneme).
Trigraph - A grapheme containing three letters that makes just one sound (phoneme).
Blending- This involves looking at a written word, looking at each grapheme and using knowledge of GPCs to work out which phoneme each grapheme represents and then merging these phonemes together to make a word.
Segmenting - This involves hearing a word, splitting it up into the phonemes (sound talk/sounding out) that make it, using knowledge of GPCs to work out which graphemes represent those phonemes and then writing those graphemes down in the right order.
