Phonics
To ensure children at James Brindley become confident, fluent and independent readers, high quality, synthetic Phonics is taught daily using our chosen scheme Supersonic Phonic Friends. This highly structured programme builds on phoneme/grapheme correspondence from the earliest stages and teaches the skills of blending for reading and segmenting for writing in a highly engaging and systematic manner.
Supersonic Phonic Friends uses fun characters throughout the programme to engage, interest and motivate the children. Each character has a rhyme or saying which the children remember and repeat when they see them appear, and each character is then linked to a phonics job such as reading, writing, segmenting or blending. The familiarisation of characters and consistency in approach is key to our children’s learning. We greatly value a multisensory approach to teaching our phonics with the use of rhymes and actions being central to our delivery and practice. We believe that high quality teaching in phonics lays the foundations to ensure that children become confident readers and writers as they progress through school and beyond.
Children in EYFS, Year 1 and Year 2, are taught in small groups by both teachers and teaching assistants, all of whom have been directly trained by Supersonic Phonic Friends. By teaching in smaller groups, lessons can be planned and tailored to meet the needs of all of our learners so in turn their confidence and love of reading continually grows. Consistency is key in the delivery of Phonics, and this is seen from EYFS to Year 2.
From the beginning of EYFS, children learn to recognise single letter phonemes and graphemes before progressing onto learning two and three letter digraphs and trigraphs. As the children transition to Year 1, they will learn a wider range of digraphs and alternative spellings and pronunciations. High frequency/ ‘Tricky’ words are taught progressively as children learn that some words cannot necessarily be sounded out and must be learnt from sight. Learning in phonics is readily applied throughout the day as the children’s skills are referred to and drawn upon in reading and writing activities across the curriculum. Children will learn to apply these sounds to their reading by reading a book which is directly matched to their phonic knowledge. Our reading books are organised and structured in a manner which ensures that children only take home a phonics book which builds upon their prior learning and allows them to transfer and apply their phonic knowledge. Alongside this, children also take home a reading for pleasure book, a book which will include high frequency or tricky words in line their level of learning
Please visit the website for more information and to meet the characters!
https://www.supersonicphonicfriends.co.uk/