Phonics
Throughout our Foundation Stage and Key Stage 1 and into Key Stage 2 at St. John's we use Red Rose Letters and Sounds to give children the skills:
- To promote speaking and listening skills
- To recognise sounds and graphemes
- To support them with blending and segmenting for reading
- To support them with blending and segmenting for spelling.
From Foundation Stage our children high quality phonic work is taught systematically. Red Rose Letters and Sounds is taught with fidelity for planning activities within the appropriate phases. Phonics is a discrete planned session that takes place every day within the Foundation class and Key Stage 1. During the sessions outlined above the children are taught:
- Grapheme- phoneme correspondence in a clearly defined sequence
- The skill of segmenting words into their constituent phonemes to spell
- That blending and segmenting are reversible skills
Phase 1
This phase is where the children will start in the Nursery class and it supports the development of speaking and listening.
Phase 2
This is the start of the systematic phonic work developed in Reception class. Grapheme- phoneme correspondence is introduced. The children learn to segment whole words and to select letters to represent the phonemes through either writing the letters or using magnetic letters to encode words.
Phase 3
This phase completes the teaching of the alphabet and then moves on to sounds represented by more than one letter, learning one representation for each of the 42 phonemes.
Phase 4
In this stage the children start to read and spell words containing adjacent consonants. There are no new phonemes taught within this phase.
Phase 5
Teaching and learning within phase 5 looks at alternative spellings for some of the phonemes.
Red Rose Spelling For Year 2
This phase marks the transition between the end of Key Stage 1 and Lower Key Stage 2. The children look much more at specific spellings e.g. see/sea. They also learn to spell words with prefixes and suffixes. Words where letters are doubled such as dripped are learnt as are words where letters are dropped e.g. come/coming. Throughout each of the phases the children will also be taught the tricky high frequency words.
The children are encouraged to use the knowledge they have acquired in their phonics sessions in their reading and writing activities.