Phonics
What is Phonics?
Phonics is a method of teaching children to read. Our children are taught to read letters or groups of letters by saying the sound(s) they represent. They start to read words by blending (synthesising) the sounds (phonemes) together to make a word. Systematic synthetic phonics is key to teaching children reading and writing. It provides them with strategies to decode words, which is especially important because there are 44 different sounds in the English language. Learning to read with phonics is, therefore, a bit like learning a code, after learning just a few sounds, you will be able to use this code to read 100's of words. The more sounds you know, the more words you will be able to work out how to read.
How is phonics taught at Mather Street?
Phonics is taught daily in Reception, Year 1 and Year 2. In Nursery, the children prepare for phonics by taking part in teacher directed activities which focus on listening to, listening for and making sounds. As a school, we follow the Rocket Phonics programme.
Rocket Phonics is a fully resourced, systematic synthetic phonics programme which uses a combination of digital and printed resources, and a fully matched series of decodable reading books. At the heart of the programme are the digital-only ‘Big Books’, which consist of language-rich stories to teach all the target letter-sounds in context. The Pupil Practice Booklets enable children to practise and apply blending and segmenting skills at letter-sound, word, sentence and text levels.
Phonics Assessment data
At the end of Year 1, the children will be assessed on their understanding of the phonics through a statutory national assessment.
2019 - 87.5%
2018 - 77.3%