Phonics at St Anne Line Infants School – draft 2013



Phonics at St Anne Line Infant School

Introduction

At St Anne Line Infants we aim to teach children the phonic skills to be able to blend sounds in order to read words and segment sounds for spelling words.

We use a government approved programme called Phonics International .

Please follow this link to the website:

All staff, including those who work in the school nursery, have been trained in this programme.

This is adapted so that it is appropriately taught for each age group. For example, an adult may stress the phonemes in a word as they help them to dress.

“Can you z-i-p your coat?”

Children are taught phonics in daily sessions which last about 20 minutes and these usually take place at the beginning of the school day. There is also an emphasis on hand-writing, pencil control and appropriate seating during these sessions. In the Early Years children will experience additional phonics activities throughout the day. The children have Phonic Folders and Practise Books- These go home daily so that parents can support the phonic teaching and handwriting at home.

You can listen to the sounds each phoneme makes

by clicking on this link:

Phonics in the Early Years

Children begin by learning the range of letters that represent the 44 phonemes or sounds of the English language. They do this in a variety of interactive fun ways including action songs and ICT games.

Children learn to blend the sounds in the written word to read it using their “ Phoneme Fingers”

They also learn the reverse of this skill by segmenting a word into its phonemes to spell it. Children are taught phonics as their first approach to reading. They are also taught some essential high frequency words like ‘the’ ‘and’ ‘was’ which may not follow the phonic rules at this early stage.

Phonics in Year 1

During year 1 the children are taught that there are a range of ways to spell a phoneme they have already learnt; for example /i/ can be ‘igh’ as in ‘night’ or ‘ie’ as in ‘pie’. They are also taught that one grapheme, or one letter, or groups of letters, can be pronounced in different ways – ‘ow’ in ‘cow’ and ‘ow’ in ‘show’. Children also focus on high frequency words. The children are given weekly spellings to reflect their taught phonics sessions

Phonics in Year 2

Phonics work in year 2 builds on previous work with children experiencing further ways to represent sounds they have previously learnt. They are also taught unusual pronunciations of graphemes or letters for example ‘c’ as in ‘prince’ and the rules for these pronunciations.

There is an emphasis in year 2 on grammar and spelling rules. The children also learn rules regarding adding suffixes and prefixes to words and that some words – homophones – have the same sound but are spelt differently like ‘wear’ and ‘where’.

The children in year 2 also are given weekly spellings which reflect the phonics taught that week.

Reading Programme

Children are taught to read through structured weekly guided reading sessions. In Reception these sessions begin when the children are ready. This is generally by the Spring term. Each session focuses on a particular reading skill or objective in accordance with the National Curriculum for English at Key stage 1 and the EYFS. Reading materials have been banded for these sessions using National Curriculum level descriptors. Books range from the simplest text for emergent readers to text for fluent readers at the end of Key stage 1.

Several reading schemes and a variety of other texts, both fiction and non-fiction are incorporated into our book banding system. The children are encouraged to read at home with an adult each day. Books are changed twice a week, if required, in Years One and Two, and on a weekly basis in Reception.

Children are supported in their reading development through use of games and activities appropriate to their level during Literacy sessions. These include word and sound games, discussion and investigation of stories, characters, comprehension activities, drama etc.

Role of the teacher

The role of the teacher is to encourage children to become independent readers by fostering a love of books and teaching them a range of access skills and strategies that enable them to decode text.

Children will be taught to:-

Recognise an ever increasing range of high frequency words as laid out in ‘Letters and Sounds’

Recognise initial phonemes, Consonant, Vowel, Consonant (C.V.C.) words, consonant blends etc. using Letters and Sounds.

Use pictures as a prompt and for discussion

Phonics is the prime approach for decoding unfamiliar words. This is supported with other strategies including looking for small words within larger words, using the visual pattern of a word e.g. look, cook, breaking words down into syllables, missing out written word and reading on to the end of the sentence for meaning and using context of story/information to make and educated guess supported by one or more of the above strategies.

Each class has a range of books. There is also a collection of material which is supportive to children who have English as an Additional Language, including dual language stories and talking dictionaries.

Our new library area at the back of the hall boasts a further range of resources for children to enjoy and a newly built puppet theatre to bring our storytelling to life.

................
................

In order to avoid copyright disputes, this page is only a partial summary.

Google Online Preview   Download