Phonics is an effective way to ‘unlock’ words and help children make progress with reading and spelling. The aim with phonics is that children can recognise and process the letters and sounds through a word so fluently that word recognition becomes automatic.

There is a clear, systematic approach to the teaching of phonics at Netherbrook Primary School. It is taught every day in Foundation Stage and Key Stage 1 and these phonic lessons last for 30 minutes. The school follows the Ofsted validated Rocket Phonics Scheme.

• Rocket Phonics Overview

• Rocket Phonics Progression

We adopt a teaching sequence of: Review, teach, practice and apply. Children are taught in whole class sessions and receive smaller group support where required.

They begin by listening to and distinguishing between a range of sounds and soon progress to learning the sounds that each letter makes. After this, the children begin to build up CVC (consonant/vowel/consonant) and CCVC words. Next, they start to learn what happens when two letters are put together eg. ch, th. They also learn the alternative spellings and pronunciations of a wide range of sounds.

There are six overlapping phonics phases.

Below is a summary based on the Rocket Phonics Scheme:

• Phase 1: Phonic Knowledge and Skills. (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 2 (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 3 (Reception): The remaining seven 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', ie. one grapheme for each phoneme in the English language.

• Phase 4 (Reception): No new grapheme-phoneme correspondences are taught in this phase. Children learn to blend and segment longer words with adjacent consonants, eg. swim, clap, jump.

• Phase 5 (Throughout 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.

• Phase 6 (Throughout Year 2 and beyond): Working on spelling, including prefixes and suffixes, doubling and dropping letters etc.