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Purley Church Of England
Primary School

Let all that you do be done in love

1 Corinthians 16:14

Phonics

Phonics

At Purley Primary School it is our intent that children access a daily phonics lesson. These lessons teach them how to read and spell rapidly so that they can read fluently, know how to spell high frequency words and apply these in their writing by the end of Key Stage 1.

Children in Reception and Year 1 follow a synthetic phonics approach, using the Twinkl Phonics programme. It’s an approach to teaching phonics in which individual letters or letter sounds are blended to form groups of letters or sounds, and those groups are then blended to form complete words. Please see “Introduction to phonics PPT for parents” as a guide to help you with some of the terms and concepts and to give you an overview of how phonics is taught at Purely.

It is important to know how to pronounce each of the phonemes correctly.

The link below provides a useful video clip showing the correct 'pure' pronunciation of phonemes and graphemes (units of sound)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BqhXUW_v-1s

In Reception children take home Rhino Readers and Bug Club books. These reading books match the phonics they are learning in school. Children learn to read at different rates and as they progress through Key Stage 1 we use a combination of reading schemes to support their reading development. These include Oxford Reading Tree, Project X and Big Cat. They give a variety of fiction and non–fiction books to develop the children’s reading range.

Our daily phonics sessions are fun, involving lots of speaking, listening and games. The emphasis is on children’s active participation. They learn to use their phonic knowledge for reading and writing activities and in their independent play.

Twinkl phonics is divided into five phases, with each phase building on the skills and knowledge of previous learning. There are no big leaps in learning. Children have time to practise and rapidly expand their ability to read and spell words. They are also taught to read and spell ‘tricky words’ – words with spellings that are unusual and can’t be sounded out. These include the words ‘to’, ‘was’, ‘said’ and ‘the’ – you cannot break the sounds down for such words, so need to just ‘recognise’ them.

At the end of Year 1 children undertake the Phonics Screening check which is a government assessment that checks if children can read real and nonsense words. 

From Year 2 – Year 6 our pupils follow the Spelling Shed Scheme. Spelling shed’s approach to spelling involves the relationship between sounds and written symbols as well as using morphology to help spell words through meaning.

Phonics at Key Stage 2

It is common for some key stage 2 children to require further phonics teaching. As part of the Twinkl Phonics SSP Programme we follow a comprehensive set of key stage 2 interventions. These daily sessions take around 20 minutes to deliver and they follow the 5-part lesson structure similar to the main phonics programme used in KS1. 

Useful webpages:

 http://www.phonicsplay.co.uk

http://www.ictgames.com/phonemeFlop_v4.html

http://www.oxfordowl.co.uk/welcome/home/reading-owl/fun-ideas

www.discoveryeducation.co.uk/espresso

How to access Discovery Education Espresso from home · go to www.discoveryeducation.co.uk

  • · click the ‘Login’ button in the top right corner
  • · select ‘Espresso’
  • · username: student4718 password: onetwo

https://www.purplemash.com/sch/purley

Children all have their individual usernames and passwords for Purple Mash.