Teaching Phonics at St John's Church of England Academy
Since November 2021 we are teaching phonics in EYFS and Year 1 through the program Essential Letters and Sounds.
What is Essential Letters and Sounds?
Essential Letters and Sounds is a systematic approach for teaching children to read using phonics.
It is based on the six phases of phonics helping children to start to learn about sounds at nursery to becoming fluent readers by the age of 7.
The phonic approach encourages us to directly link letters (graphemes) to sounds (phonemes), and to teach children pure sounds like a, h, b, k when encountering the alphabet. So, children learn how to put sounds represented by letters or letter groups (like ch or igh) together to read words in a more straightforward way.
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Phonics Milestones Progression Document in line with Essential Letters and Sounds provides details of discrete Phonics teaching across EYFS, KS1 and into KS2 where needed. The focus of this is ensuring children have a rigorous and systematic approach to learning of phonemes, graphemes, decoding skills, sight word recognition and fluency.
This is reviewed annually due to cohort need and is amended to reflect changes made due to Covid/Lockdown/Remote Education.
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