Phonics

Teaching of Phonics at St Ambrose Barlow Catholic Primary School

At St Ambrose Barlow Catholic Primary School, we aim to foster a love of language and reading and, therefore, attach great importance to enabling our children to become fluent readers.

In Reception, Year 1 and Year 2 we follow the ‘Letters and Sounds’ phonics programme, supported by actions used in the ‘Jolly Phonics’ programme. This teaches children the sounds and tricky words needed to support them with their reading and writing. From Year Two this is then supported by the National Curriculum spelling document, which teaches the children the basic skills needed to read and write words.

Phonics is a method of teaching reading and writing where the children are systematically taught the relationships between the sounds in our language (phonemes) and the letters used to represent those sounds (graphemes). Once children have been taught which sounds are linked to which letters they can confidently attempt to read and write anything they wish.

Letters and Sounds is a phonics resource published by the Department for Education and Skills in 2007. It aims to build children’s speaking and listening skills in their own right as well as to prepare children for learning to read by developing their phonic knowledge and skills. It sets out a detailed and systematic programme for teaching phonic skills for children starting by the age of five, with the aim of them becoming fluent readers by age seven.