Phonics at St Mary's
At St Mary's we encourage our children to learn, read and spell and to develop an understanding of the 44 different letter sounds.
Pupils are taught to:
- apply phonic knowledge and skills as the route to decode words
- respond speedily with the correct sound to graphemes (letters or groups of letters) for all 40+ phonemes, including, where applicable, alternative sounds for graphemes
- read accurately by blending sounds in unfamiliar words containing GPCs that have been taught
- read common exception words, noting unusual correspondences between spelling and sound and where these occur in the word
- read words containing taught GPCs and –s, –es, –ing, –ed, –er and –est endings
- read other words of more than one syllable that contain taught GPCs
- read words with contractions [for example, I’m, I’ll, we’ll], and understand that the apostrophe represents the omitted letter(s)
- read aloud accurately books that are consistent with their developing phonic knowledge and that do not require them to use other strategies to work out words
re-read these books to build up their fluency and confidence in word reading.
At St Mary's Primary and Nursery Academy from Nursery onwards we mainly follow the letters and sounds guidance. This guidance is supplemented by the best parts of other schemes such as Oxford Reading Tree Floppy Phonics.