Early Reading and Phonics

At Ellistown Primary School, reading is promoted as an intrinsic part of teaching and learning. The ability to read is not only the key to learning but it also has a huge impact on children’s self-esteem and future life chances.

As a school, we will ensure that our children are taught to read with fluency, accuracy and understanding through a variety of discreet and cross-curricular learning opportunities.

Above all, we want children in our school to become enthusiastic, independent and reflective readers. 

We want our children to fall in love with reading so that it brings them pleasure and allows them to experience new things, discover new worlds and explore the emotions of others. 

In EYFS and Key Stage One the children are taught to read and write following the ‘Letters and Sounds’ curriculum. This programme teaches children to decode (break down) words into their smallest units of sound (phonemes) systematically.  

In the Early Years, teachers use actions and songs for each sound to help the children remember the letter shape, name and the sound it makes. 

Phonics Phases

Our phonics curriculum takes children through six Phases, with children typically moving through Phases 1-4 during Reception, and then onto Phase 5 and 6 throughout Year 1 and 2.

​With lots of repetition and weekly development of skills, we find that we are able to really build confidence and challenge children at an appropriate level.

Phase 1

The focus is on listening and making sounds with mouths and bodies—e.g. environmental sounds, rhyme, rhythm, alliteration and early letter recognition.

Phase 2

Each week, children learn single letters and their corresponding sounds in a useful order (e.g. SATPIN) so that they can begin to blend and segment short words.

Phase 3

Phase 3 introduces ‘friendly letters’ letters (where two letters make one sound, e.g. ai, oa, sh). Skills in blending and segmenting are further developed.

Phase 4

This phase is an opportunity to recap all Phase 2/3 sounds in a range of contexts. Children begin to read and write 2-syllable words and words where two sounds are close together  (e.g. s-l-i-p / p-l-ay / f-r-igh-t). 

Phase 5

Tackles the complexities of spelling in English and teaches children to explore alternative spellings and pronunciations for all sounds (e.g. all different spellings of /ay/).  They will learn how to apply a ‘best bet’ rule (e.g. /oi/ in the middle, /oy/ at the end) and will begin reading and talking about suffixes.

Phase 6

Children begin to tackle grammatical rules for the spellings when writing tenses, adding suffixes and prefixes, contractions and strategies for spelling tricky words.