Phonics
At St Leonard’s Catholic Primary School we recognise that being able to read is one of the most important skills children will learn during their early schooling. This has far-reaching implications for lifelong confidence and well-being.
Our reading curriculum helps to ensure that young children are well-placed to read and spell words with fluency and confidence by the time they reach the end of KS1. This is an entitlement we want to achieve for every child.
Our school’s phonics programme is Sounds-Write, which begins with the sounds in the language and moves from sounds to the written word.
Children will learn the skills of:
- Blending – the ability to push sounds together to build words.
- Segmenting – the ability to pull apart the individual sounds in words.
- Phoneme manipulation – the ability to insert sounds into and delete sounds out of words. E.g. spelling <o>. Is it /o/ as in hot, /oe/ as in no, or /u/ as in son?
The children also build on their conceptual knowledge:
- Letters are symbols (spellings) that represent sounds.
- A sound may be spelled by 1, 2, 3 or 4 letters.
- The same sound can be spelled in more than one way.
- Many spellings can represent more than one sound.
