Curriculum Intent

At St Mary and All Saints, we believe in a strong foundation in Phonics is fundamental to a child’s academic development. We follow a systematic synthetic phonics programme called Unlocking Letters and sounds. This scheme is designed to foster a love for reading and empower students with the essential skills needed to become proficient readers and communicators. Through this curriculum, we aim to lay the groundwork for a lifetime of successful learning and exploration through reading and writing.

Our vision for our phonics teaching is to ensure that every student becomes a confident and proficient reader. We intend to equip our students with skills and knowledge needed to decode words, understand the structure of the English language, and ultimately develop a lifelong passion for reading.

 

 

Curriculum Implementation

Phonics is prioritised every day in Reception, Year One and Year Two. Each dedicated whole class lessons follow the same five step structure.

• Revisit
• Teach
• Practice
• Apply
• Revise

The revisit section recaps over previous sounds and common exception words, the children are then taught something new. This is then practiced and put into word reading and spelling. The children then apply the new sound taught to embed the new sound into a sentence through reading and writing. This is always revised and misconceptions are addressed at the end of each session. These run between 20-30 minutes each day. LSA’s are used to support children in the classrooms during the lessons.

If gaps are appearing in children’s learning or misconceptions need addressing 1:1 interventions are put in place. If children need higher level support group sessions are run to allow children to address gaps and make progress.

In Key Stage Two children who need interventions are baselined at the beginning of the academic year and 1:1 interventions or group taught sessions are put in place.

This is a consistent approach used across the school.

 

 

 

 

Parents

We run comprehensive phonics mornings for parents in Reception and Key Stage 1 to allow them to understand how their child is being taught phonics and how best to support them at home. They also go and see live phonics lessons in action, observing their child take part in a phonics lesson in their classroom. Parents are provided with information to be able to use at home with their child and a resource pack, linking directly to the resources used to support children in schools. This is available on parental request from the school office.

 

Vocabulary

Phoneme -Smallest unit of sound

Grapheme – Written representation of a phoneme

Grapheme, phoneme correspondence – Link between phoneme and grapheme

Digraph – two phonemes make one sound

Trigraph – Three phonemes make one sound.