Phonics

Intent

At Hertford Heath Primary School, we recognise reading and writing as key life skills, which underpins the children's access to the rest of the curriculum. We believe that all children should progress through the phonics phases with fluency and confidence and therefore place high importance on high quality teaching and resources. A strong phonics basis enables us to ensure our children flourish as readers and writers and therefore develop socially, emotionally, intellectually, and culturally.

Implementation

• We teach phonics every day for 30 minutes using the Essential Letters and Sounds program.
• Our children are always working towards the next steps in phonics, covering each phase until they have the skills to segment and blend sounds, so that they can read fluently and with comprehension.
• ELS supports children and gives them practise in handwriting, spelling and punctuation
• Phonics from EYFS to Year 2 is taught as a whole class with immediate intervention during the apply part of the lesson, and intervention groups where assessments show it is necessary.
• As the children progress in to KS2, identified children are picked up and they receive targeted interventions. The transition from learning phonic sounds is then focussed on to applying this knowledge to their spelling patterns.
• The assessment of pupils’ phonics progress is frequent (the first week of half term) and identifies progression and delay, so that targeted support can be put in place and given immediately.
• Teachers and teaching assistants have developed sufficient expertise in the teaching of phonics which ensures consistency from year to year.
• Teachers have clear understanding of how children learn to read and write from the EYFS.
• Children are provided with books for reading at home that are closely matched to the phonic phase they are working at. In Reception the sounds are sent home for children to practise.
• All classes have a story at the end of the day, in KS1 the children vote for the story they would like to read.
• KS1 classes have a reading bear that the children take home to read to.

Impact

• All pupils, including the weakest readers and writers make good progress. Most make sufficient progress to meet or exceed age—related expectations.
• Children choose to read books, they are familiar and enjoy listening and reading a wide range of books by a variety of authors: stories, rhymes, poems, non-fiction, and factual books.
• Pupils become fluent with handwriting and confident with spelling, grammar, and sentence construction. They put their writing skills into everyday context: writing shopping list, text message etc, and use it to create their written work.