All children in at Overdale Infant School have daily phonics sessions. Phonics is a crucial part of Foundation Stage and Key Stage One as it gives children confidence and helps them become independent readers and writers.

Our school is a Universal school for the Knowledge Transfer Centre scheme for Phonics and Reading. This is a project for phonics and reading based on Letters and Sounds developed by Literacy Consultant Ann Smallberger.

Children also learn to read and spell tricky words; words which don’t rely on phonics. 

Phonics is taught through various phases:

• Phase 1 focuses on everyday sounds, rhythm and rhyme, alliteration and orally segmenting and blending.
• Phase 2 focuses on learning all single sounds and how to read and write them in words.
• Phase 3 focuses on learning simple digraph and trigraph sounds and applying these to words and sentences (for example, igh, oo, ear and er)
• Phase 4 focuses on learning adjacent consonants in words (for example, fl, pr,cr and st)
• Phase 5 focuses on learning alternative digraph and trigraph sounds and applying these to words and sentences (for example, ie, ph, oe and ai)

Children in Year 2 start with recapping phase 5 of phonics before moving on spelling rules and patterns.

When we read in phonics we:

• Read new and old graphemes that make the same sound.
• Read words moving a card across the graphemes.
•  The children say: “Look at the letters, make the sounds and blend the sounds together”

When we write in phonics we:

• Write different words using the sound
• Use correct letter formation (ascenders and descenders and only capital letters in the correct place)
• The children say: “Say the word, finger the word, write the word”