Phonics

At Our Lady’s Bishop Eton, we use the ‘twinkl’ phonics programme.We aim for every child to become a fluent, confident reader who is passionate about reading. We believe that a high quality English curriculum will give our children the best possible chance to become competent communicators and thinkers who love reading and writing.

We advocate that children in EYFS and Year 1 use phonics as the first strategy for decoding unfamiliar words. At Our Lady’s Bishop Eton, we teach phonics using the DfE accredited scheme Twinkl Phonics. Our EYFS and Key Stage 1 children have daily Twinkl phonics sessions and we support our most vulnerable readers with additional targeted intervention.  Children in Year 3 and beyond; where necessary,  with gaps in their phonic knowledge will also be supported through high quality Twinkl phonics teaching and intervention.

Phonics is a way of teaching children to read quickly and skillfully. Children are taught how to:

• Recognise the sounds that individual letters make
• Identify the sounds that different combinations of letters make – such as ‘sh’ or ‘oo’
• Blend these sounds together form left to right to make a word

Children can then use this knowledge to ‘decode’ new words that they hear or see. This is the first important step in learning to read. Children are taught to read words by blending, which means pushing all of the sounds together to make a word. The children are taught to spell words by segmenting, which means sounding out words and writing down the sounds they can hear.

Children have multiple daily opportunities to apply their learning. Children read Twinkl phonics reading books ‘Rhino readers’ and other books that are carefully matched to the phonic teaching sequence and their current phonic knowledge. Our children do not read books both in school reading sessions and at home that include spellings of the sounds they do not know. This means that they build confidence quickly. However we do read a wide variety of texts to our children that contain all of the spellings in the English language and that are rich in vocabulary and encourage a love of books and reading for pleasure.