- Norbridge Academy
- Stanley Street, Worksop,
- Nottinghamshire, S81 7HX
- Telephone:01909 472322
- Email:office@norbridge.notts.sch.uk
Phonics
Phonics teaching is given a high priority at Norbridge. Phonics teaching is a crucial part of teaching children to read and write. Children in The Foundation Stage and Key Stage One receive daily phonics lessons to support them in developing their reading and writing skills. Children are regularly assessed in their phonics knowledge to ensure they are accessing learning at the correct level and to inform any interventions that need to take place. In phonics lessons, children learn about the letters that sounds make and the different ways that these sounds can be represented. They also learn how to blend sounds to help them read words and segment words to help them write the different sounds. Learning how to read and spell tricky words also is a key part of our phonics learning.
Phonics lessons follow the Letters and Sounds programme. We use a wide variety of resources to enhance lessons and make phonics fun, that is how we feel children learn best. There are six phases of the Letters and Sounds programme. You can find more information about what phase your child will be learning below:
Phase One (Nursery/Reception) |
Activities are divided into seven aspects, including environmental sounds, instrumental sounds, body sounds, rhythm and rhyme, alliteration, voice sounds and finally oral blending and segmenting. |
Phase Two (Reception) up to 6 weeks |
Learning 19 letters of the alphabet and one sound for each. Blending sounds together to make words. Segmenting words into their separate sounds. Beginning to read simple captions. |
Phase Three (Reception) up to 12 weeks | The remaining 7 letters of the alphabet, one sound for each. Graphemes such as ch, oo, th representing the remaining phonemes not covered by single letters. Reading captions, sentences and questions. On completion of this phase, children will have learnt the "simple code", i.e. one grapheme for each phoneme in the English language. |
Phase Four (Reception) 4 to 6 weeks |
No new grapheme-phoneme correspondences are taught in this phase. Children learn to blend and segment longer words with adjacent consonants, e.g. swim, clap, jump. |
Phase Five (Throughout Year 1) | Now we move on to the "complex code". Children learn more graphemes for the phonemes which they already know, plus different ways of pronouncing the graphemes they already know. |
Phase Six (Throughout Year 2 and beyond) |
Working on spelling, including prefixes and suffixes, doubling and dropping letters etc. |
To help children learn and remember the different phonics sounds and how they are represented, we also use the Twinkl Phonics actions to support children. You can find information on the different actions we use in school in the document links below.
Parents and children have access to the Bug Club website at home which they can use to access a range of books at the correct phonic level for their child. There are also a range of free phonics games on Phonics Play that children can use to support their phonics learning at home.Below there is a selection of resources that you can access to support your child's learning of phonics in the Foundation Stage. We hope you find this information useful in helping you understand the phonics learning that your child will be doing at Norbridge. Please don't hesitate to contact your child's class teacher if you would like any more information.