Phonics and Spelling at RL Hughes Primary School
Letters and Sounds
All pupils from Foundation Stage through to the end of Y2 are
taught the early skills of reading and writing following the DFEs
recommended phonics resource ‘Letters and Sounds’. It aims to
build a child’s speaking and listening skills as well as to prepare
pupils for learning to read and write by developing their phonic
knowledge and skills. It is a systematic and detailed programme
which is taught every day in foundation stage and KS1. The
children then use these phonic skills to help them to read and
spell.
The scheme is also used as a support programme in KS2 for those
pupils who have been identified with specific learning difficulties
in reading and writing; for the majority of these pupils they soon
catch up and achieve a good standard in reading and writing by
the end of Key Stage 2.
The scheme is first introduced to pupils in the Nursery when it is
felt they are developmentally ready. The experiences they receive
involve a lot of listening and talking about the sounds they hear in
the environment, opportunities to identity and distinguish
between different sounds. They then progress onto listening to
the sounds within a word and blending these together to say a
word e.g. a game we play is called ‘Robot talk’ whereby an adult
segments a word by saying individual sounds and the child has to
blend the sounds together to guess the word e.g. d-o-g /dog, sh-ip/ship etc. The visual representation of a sound/letter i.e. how it
is written down only happens towards the end of nursery and the
start of reception. It is very important that a child can hear and
distinguish different letter sounds in a word orally before they
attempt to read and write sounds and letters.
On entry to reception the children are introduced to 19 letters
/sounds of the alphabet in phase 2 of the scheme over a few
weeks. They are immediately able to blend and segment these
sounds to read and make simple words. They begin to read simple
captions and make sense of what they are reading. Once these
sounds are secure the remaining letters/sounds are introduced
and the sounds that are represented by more than one letter e.g.
ch/chips, oo/school, ai/ rain, ee/sleep.
Alternative spelling e.g. ai /‘sail’, ay/play, a-e/make, a /lady,
ey/grey, eigh/sleigh and pronunciations e.g. ‘ea’ head, ‘sea’ ‘great’
are introduced throughout Y1 and y2.
Alongside phonic development, your child is taught a series of
‘tricky words’ these are words that cannot be decoded
phonetically and have to be learnt as ‘sight’ words e.g. ‘the’,
‘said’, ‘water’.
‘Letters and Sounds’ is taught every day!
What can you do at home to help your child?
o When they are faced with a word which they are
unable to read, help them to ‘break’ the word up into
sounds and then encourage them to blend the sounds
together to read the word e.g. ch-ur-ch, w-i-n-d-o-w.
o We teach the children the articulation of ‘pure’ sounds
i.e.’saying ‘b’ and ‘t’ as short clipped sounds rather
than elongating them as ‘buh’ and ‘tuh’. It is very
important that they are encouraged to do this as it
causes problems when they are blending to read and
segmenting sounds to spell.
o Some words cannot be ‘sounded’ out, the ‘tricky
words’. Your child will bring a list of these home, when
they are developmentally ready, which you can refer
to support reading and spelling. These words are sight
words and should not be broken down into sounds e.g.
the, said, people.
o Model writing with your child e.g ask them to help you
to write a shopping list, greeting cards etc. that way
they can practise using the sounds they know to write
independently. Support for Spelling By the time your child reaches Y2 they are able to read
with greater fluency and be able to use their phonic
knowledge to write independently, they are then ready to
begin our spelling programme ‘Support for Spelling’ which
is taught throughout Y2 and KS2.This programme enables
pupils to build on their phonic knowledge and now look at
spelling conventions and patterns to become fluent readers,
effective writers and accurate spellers so they can channel
their energies into the skills of composition, sentence
structure and precise word choice.