Phonics Intent

Phonics is key to children learning to read quickly and accurately. It gives children the gift of access to the wonderful world that books and a love of reading affords them.

Reading underpins all learning and enables our children to be confident, independent learners who have high levels of self-confidence in every area of life. Phonics is the route to our children learning to read confidently.

Implementation

Our rigorous phonics program at Glade is underpinned by the following principles:

•  Phonics begins as school begins;
• Reading and writing are taught separately but concurrently;
• Lessons are dyslexia friendly and consistent across classes, year groups, and interventions;
• Word-level work occurs in the phonics lesson with sentence-level work occurring in reading sessions;
• Pace is key, with a high volume of words being read by children during a phonics lesson;
• Interventions have the same expectations as lessons and the impact is immediate and noticeable;
• Children are taught in whole class sessions with interventions to close gaps;
• Children who require interventions are identified quickly, and a suitable intervention is implemented to enable them to close the gap;
• ‘Keep up’ interventions are used to ensure that no child is left behind;

While phonics begins as school begins, we also reach out to local providers of pre-school education to work together to ensure that children can come to Glade with good speaking and listening skills and have laid good foundations for the phonic work that will begin as they arrive at school.

The Glade phonics teaching is based on an enhanced Letters and Sounds model. Our progression documents show the sequence and expectations for teaching and the phonic phases.

It is our intention that every child who is able to, will pass the phonics check at the end of Year 1. Children who do not pass the phonics check in Year 1 or 2 continue phonics interventions into Key stage 2 until they can read confidently.