All children in Reception and Year 1 have a daily phonics lesson to support them in learning to read. At Sedlescombe Church of England Primary School the children are taught phonics using Letters and Sounds. At the end of Year 1 all children have their phonic knowledge assessed using a statutory phonics screening check. Parents and carers are informed as to whether their child has met the required standard in their end of Year 1 school report.

Any children who have not met the required standard will be assessed again at the end of Year 2 and will continue to work on their phonics daily throughout Year 2. Children who meet the required standard at the end of Year 1 will switch their focus from using phonics to support them in learning to read to applying their phonic knowledge to learn to spell the Year 2 words.

What is phonics?

Phonics is all about sounds and is one method of teaching children how to read and write. There are 44 sounds in the English language, which are put together to form words. Some sounds are represented by one letter, like ‘t’, and some by two or more, like ‘ck’ in duck and ‘air’ in chair.

Children are taught the sounds first, then how to match them to letters, and finally how to use the letter sounds for reading and spelling. Synthetic phonics refers to ‘synthesising’, or blending, the sounds to read words. It’s based on the idea that children should sound out unknown words and not rely on their context to be able to read them.

More information can be found by downloading the Phonics Leaflet for parents at the side of this page and by looking at the link to the Reading Workshop for Parents.

Phonics and Reading Workshop for Parents

To learn how to say the sounds please click on the video link below.