Hartford Primary SchoolPhonics
Letters and Sounds is the resource we use at Hartford Primary School to support the systematic, synthetic teaching of phonics. The teaching of phonics is key to the development of good reading skills. We believe that reading is an important and essential skill for all children because reading is the gateway to learning.
Children learn the sounds within words to help decode them. In EYFS, they learn to recognise each letter and match it to its sound. They then move onto groups of two letters (digraphs) or three letters (trigraphs) that say a new sound when put together. They learn how to pronounce these sounds (phonemes) correctly so that they can segment and blend words correctly. Children are also taught to recognise common high frequency words and 'tricky' words as well as being able to spell these. We follow Letters and Sounds to teach phonics throughout EYFS and KS1 and we enhance our teaching with Phonics Play to make learning fun and interactive.
EYFS and KS1 children have daily phonics lessons of 20-30 minutes. This learning is then consolidated during English lessons and Guided Reading sessions to ensure that children use phonics as the route to decoding unfamiliar words. We ensure that any child who has not passed the phonics check by the end of KS1 has further phonics teaching into KS2.