Phonics
At St Oswald’s C of E Primary, we teach Phonics using ‘Bug Club Phonics’ a DfE approved systematic synthetic phonics programme. Bug Club Phonics is a comprehensive phonics teaching programme centred around an accessible and inclusive teaching approach. Bug Club Phonics is designed to build children’s confidence and enjoyment of reading at the very start of their reading journey. The programme follows an approach of synthesising phonemes associated with graphemes a child sees; or put another way, learning to read by blending the sounds associated with the letters a child sees. The programme is the product of extensive research on effective ways to teach children how to read. The teaching of phonics at St Oswald’s C of E Primary will begin in Reception and continue throughout school.
Phonics teaching happens across EYFS and KS1 at the start of every day. Our phonics teaching is well structured and is followed consistently by staff in school. Staff are well trained, demonstrate a good understanding of how young children learn to read and always have high expectations of all pupils.
As a school, we teach the phonics phases in the following way:
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- Nursery – Phases 1 – 2
- Reception – Phases 1 – 4
- Year 1 – Phases 3 – 6
- Year 2 – Phases 5 – 6
Children will learn new phoneme grapheme correspondences and practise the ones they have previously learned. Daily sessions typically last around 30 minutes and follow the same components:
| Revisit and Review Session | To reinforce prior learning to help children to know and remember more of their phonics learning |
| Teach Session for New Learning | Children learn a new phoneme/grapheme/ (sound/letter) correspondence |
| Practise Session | To consolidate new learning |
| Application | Children apply new learning into sentence reading or writing contexts to strengthen understanding |
Phoneme/grapheme (sound/letter) correspondences for reading and spelling are taught in a specified order. ‘Irregular Words’ words that cannot be decoded using phonics and need a whole word approach are also taught systematically throughout.
Below you will find links to useful documents and videos. If you would like to know more about our teaching of phonics or wish to speak to anyone about it, please contact Miss Miller via the school office.
Further viewing
For more information about phonics you can watch this video from Bug Club called All you need to know about phonics.