At Ashleigh we teach Synthetic Phonics following the Letters and Sounds approach. This is a progressive approach which enables children to learn phonemes and corresponding graphemes, from which they are then taught how to segment and blend to read and write. Children are also taught tricky words (common exception words).
| Nursery | Reception | Year 1 | Year 2 | |
| Phases | Teach1 Initial sounds Rhyme Alliteration Robot-talk it “put your h-a-t on your p-e-g” | Teach 2, 3, 4 Phase 1 underpins | Recap 4 Teach 5 Phase 1 underpins | Teach 6 Phase 1 underpins SPAG |
| Links to other schemes | Jolly phonics actions to be taught alongside the teaching of the phoneme/grapheme | Where streaming for phonics teaching takes place Phase 2 will continue using Jolly Phonics actions. Jolly Phonics is phased out in Phase 3 | VCOP |
| Phase | Phonic Knowledge and Skills |
| Phase One (Nursery/Reception) | Activities are divided into seven aspects, including environmental sounds, instrumental sounds, body sounds, rhythm and rhyme, alliteration, voice sounds and finally oral blending and segmenting. |
| Phase Two (Reception) up to 6 weeks | Learning 19 letters of the alphabet and one sound for each. Blending sounds together to make words. Segmenting words into their separate sounds. Beginning to read simple captions. |
| Phase Three (Reception) up to 12 weeks | The remaining 7 letters of the alphabet, one sound for each. Graphemes such as ch, oo, th representing the remaining phonemes not covered by single letters. Reading captions, sentences and questions. On completion of this phase, children will have learnt the “simple code”, i.e. one grapheme for each phoneme in the English language. |
| Phase Four (Reception) 4 to 6 weeks | No new grapheme-phoneme correspondences are taught in this phase. Children learn to blend and segment longer words with adjacent consonants, e.g. swim, clap, jump. |
| Phase Five (Throughout Year 1) | Now we move on to the “complex code”. Children learn more graphemes for the phonemes which they already know, plus different ways of pronouncing the graphemes they already know. |
| Phase Six (Throughout Year 2 and beyond) | Working on spelling, including prefixes and suffixes, doubling and dropping letters etc. |
