Essential Letters and Sounds Phonic Scheme of Learning

What is Phonics?

At North Petherton Primary School, we aim to develop confident, fluent and passionate readers and writers from an early stage. We start your child's reading journey by teaching Essential Letters and Sounds (ELS). This is a phonics program and supports your children to develop the skills and knowledge needed for reading.

Your children will begin the program in Reception and complete it at the end of Year One. In Year Two, your children will continue to practise these skills using ELS and Accelerated Reader to ensure that they can become clear, confident and fluent readers.

What is Essential Letters and Sounds?

ELS teaches children to read using a systematic synthetic phonics approach. It is designed to be used in an early learning environment that is rich in talk and story, where children experience the joy of books and language whilst rapidly acquiring the skills to become fluent independent readers and writers.

ELS teaches children to:

• decode by identifying each sound within a word and blending them together to read fluently

• encode by segmenting each sound to write words accurately.

Reception

Phase 2
Starts with single sounds for each letter of the alphabet. Children learn the letter names and the sound they make. This supports in learning how to blend and segment phonemes.  Children will also learn diagraphs (2 letters that make 1 sound) such as ck, ll, ff, ss etc. They will how to read and spell the words: I, the, no, put, of, is, to go, into, pull as, his.

Phase 3
Children progress to more complex digraphs, vowel digraphs and trigraphs (3 letters that make 1 sound). Again, they learn how to blend and segment sounds into words and start to recognise words that have two syllables. Children will to read and spell the words:  are: he, she, buses, we, me, be, push, was, her, my, you.

Phase 3-4
We start to introduce elements of Phase 4 in the form of adjacent consonants alongside the Phase 3 teaching to extend children's sounding out and blending skills. Children learn to read and spell the words: they, all, are, ball, tall, when, what, said, so, have, were, out, like, some, come, there, little, one, do, children, love. This phase is taught for a full term to help children consolidate learning.

Phase 4
The focus of phase 4 is blending words with two or three adjacent consonants. These adjacent consonant sounds can both be heard when you say the word which makes them different from a digraph. These are words such as – flat, last, crab etc.
 

Phase 5 Intro
Children learn alternative ways of making sounds learnt in phase 3 – e.g. the 'ai' sound in r-ai-n, children will learn another way of making a long 'a' sound, such as 'ay' as in p-l-ay. Children will also learn split digraphs a-e (game), e-e (scene), i-e (kite), o-e (bone) and u-e (cube). They will also learn to read and spell words, such as, are also taught oh, their, people, Mr, Mrs, your, ask, should, would, could, asked, house, mouse, water, want, very.

Year 1

Phase 5 Intro
Children will recap this phase from Reception in the Autumn term. In addition, they will learn to read and spell words including: please, once, any, many, again, who, whole, where, two.

Phase 5b
This phase introduces children to phonemes that produce more than one sound – such as 'ch' (like chat) can make a 'c' sound as in (school) or a 'sh' sound as in (chef). The children also learn the words: here, sugar, friend, because.

Phase 5c
In this phase the children learn about alternative spellings of sounds. This provides the children with a wider phonic bank to draw on when reading and writing.  Children will learn how to read polysyllabic words (more than one syllable) and these will include alternative pronunciations of sounds. Through the whole of phase 5, children will continue to learn and practice how to read and spell common exception words.

Phonics Screening Check

The phonics screening check is a quick and easy check of your child’s phonics knowledge. It helps your school confirm whether your child has made the expected progress.

In the summer term Year 1 children, will participate in the phonics screen check.  Children in Year 2, who did not pass Year , will re-sit the phonics screen.

How does the check work?
• Your child will sit with a teacher he or she knows and be asked to read 40 words aloud.
• Your child may have read some of the words before, while others will be completely new.
• The check normally takes just a few minutes to complete and there is no time limit.

The check is carefully designed not to be stressful for your child.

After the check
The school will tell you about your child’s progress in phonics and how he or she has done in the screening check in the last half-term of Year 1.

Reading to Support ELS

It is vital that whilst children are learning to read, they read books that match their phonic knowledge. The Oxford University Press supports Essential Letters and Sounds.  Every book has been carefully matched to the program.

The books are intended to be used during phonic lessons and as home readers.  Children keep the books for one week and need to aim to re-read them at least four times in this period. Re-reading ensures that children develop their reading skills and fluency. 

The children's reading book will be matched to the phase of phonics that they are currently learning.