Phonics 
At Staincliffe CE Junior School we provide phonics for the children who need it. We use the Rapid Phonics scheme to deliver our phonics interventions.
Phonics is a way of teaching children to read quickly and skilfully. They are taught how to:
- recognise the sounds that each individual letter makes;
- identify the sounds that different combinations of letters make - such as /sh/ or /oo/; and
- blend these sounds together from left to right to make a word.
What is phonics? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=42jb6PopZCI Follow this link for more detail.
There are 6 phonic phases. Details of each follow below.
Phase 1
In Phase 1 phonics, children are taught about:
Environmental sounds
Instrumental sounds
Body percussion (e.g. clapping and stamping)
Rhythm and rhyme
Alliteration
Voice sounds
Oral blending and segmenting (e.g. hearing that d-o-g makes ‘dog’)
Typical activities for teaching Phase 1 phonics include 'listening' walks, playing and identifying instruments, action songs, learning rhymes and playing games like I Spy.
This phase is intended to develop children’s listening, vocabulary and speaking skills.
Phase 2
In Phase 2, children begin to learn the sounds that letters make (phonemes). There are 44 sounds in all. Some are made with two letters, but in Phase 2, children focus on learning the 19 most common single letter sounds.
By the end of Phase 2 children should be able to read some vowel-consonant (VC) and consonant-vowel-consonant (CVC) words, and to spell them out.
Phase 3
Phase 3 introduces children to the remaining, more difficult and/or less commonly used phonemes. There are around 25 of these.
Phase 4
In Phase 4 phonics, children will, among other things:
Practise reading and spelling CVCC words (‘bump', 'nest', ‘belt,’ ‘milk’, etc)
Practise reading and spelling high frequency words
Practise reading and writing sentences
Learn more tricky words, including ‘have,’ ‘like,’ ‘some,’ ‘little’
Phase 5
Children learn new graphemes (different ways of spelling each sound) and alternative pronunciations for these: for example, learning that the grapheme ‘ow’ makes a different sound in ‘snow’ and ‘cow’. They should become quicker at blending, and start to do it silently. They learn about split digraphs (the ‘magic e’) such as the a-e in ‘name.’ They’ll start to choose the right graphemes when spelling, and will learn more tricky words, including ‘people,’ ‘water’ and ‘friend’. They also learn one new phoneme: /zh/, as in ‘treasure.’
Phase 6
By Phase 6, children should be able to read hundreds of words using one of three strategies:
Reading them automatically
Decoding them quickly and silently
Decoding them aloud
At Staincliffe CE Junior School we cover Phase 6 phonics in spelling lessons.
Every child who needs phonics is taught for 25 minutes per day. They are given a reading book that matches their phonic phase and their weekly spellings are also from words learnt in their phonic phase.
Please click on the links below for a list of phonics terminology and a list of many useful websites linked to phonics for you and your children to access at home.