Our Lady of the Rosary

Phonics

At Our Lady of the Rosary School, our vision is to transform the lives of our pupils within a Catholic environment by nurturing the wellbeing of each child, promoting the highest academic achievement and instilling a lifelong love of learning. We aim to fulfil our school strap line ‘Faith, Love, Learning’ by igniting a thirst for knowledge and a desire to achieve through an engaging and creative curriculum that promotes the highest academic achievements and prepares our pupils to be successful in their adult life.

Vision...

At Our Lady of the Rosary, we believe that early reading is a skill, which is taught through planned, systematic phonics lessons. Through these lessons, pupils will develop the skills to be fluent and efficient readers. We believe that early reading is a key life skill and we want pupils to quickly become enthusiastic and motivated readers. Our pupils will experience a wide range of high-quality genres and texts, to promote a love of literature and an enjoyment of reading for pleasure and for information.

 

Intent

At Our Lady of the Rosary we consider phonics to be the key in unlocking the skills to accessing the wider curriculum. Our aims for pupils are: to develop phonetic skills which lead to blending and reading fluently, to understand how to tackle any unfamiliar words, to read confidently for meaning and to read regularly for pleasure. Through the teaching of systematic phonics, our aim is for pupils to become confident readers by the end of Key Stage 1.  Pupils can then focus on developing fluency and comprehension throughout the school.

 

Implementation

At Our Lady of the Rosary, we are dedicated to enabling our pupils to become enthused, engaged and successful lifelong readers. To achieve this, we implement a well-planned, structured and adapted daily phonic lesson where phonetic knowledge is developed. We use a synthetic phonics programme called Jolly Phonics. This programme is a method of learning letter sounds and blending them together to read and write words.

Jolly Phonics is a multisensory programme that teaches young pupils the skills they need to read and write fluently. It teaches the alphabetic code and highlights the relationship between the sounds that can be heard in words and the letters that are used to represent those sounds. These sounds are taught in a systematic way following the progressive steps of the programme.

Step 1 teaches the pupils one way to write each letter sound and Steps 2 and 3 introduce and revise the alternative sounds.

The effective systematic teaching of phonics has a high priority throughout EYFS and Key Stage 1. Phonics is taught daily to all pupils in EYFS, Year 1 and those in Year 2 who have not passed the Phonics Screening Check in Year 1.

 

Foundations for phonics in Nursery.

There is a strong focus on language development within EYFS. Activities include: sharing high-quality stories and poems, learning a range of nursery rhymes and action rhymes, developing focused listening and attention, which includes oral blending and attention to high-quality language.

 

Daily phonics lessons in Reception and Year 1

Phonics is taught for 30 minutes a day. The structure of the lesson incorporates five key skills, which are;              

  • learning letter sounds
  • learning letter formation
  • blending
  • identifying sounds in words to write
  • tricky words

Pupils are familiar with the structure of the lessons and have the opportunity to apply new learning. Each new letter sound is introduced through a story, an action and a song. The pupils are also shown how it is represented in a written format and practise writing this using various media. Flashcards of the taught sounds are shown at the beginning of every lesson with the pupils encouraged to articulate the sounds correctly and demonstrate the actions. The pupils have the opportunity to blend and identify sounds in words (orally and through dictation).  Pupils identified as requiring extra support will receive interventions based on their needs to ensure that they catch up quickly.

In addition to daily phonic lessons, pupils are given a reading book to take home.  Pupils will progress through the reading scheme books. This is a combination of books from the Jolly Phonics Reading Scheme, Oxford Reading Tree and PM benchmark. Reading books are colour coded and are linked to the sounds that the pupils have been taught.  Pupils will read to their class teacher once a week, with any pupils identified as needing extra support reading more frequently.

Impact

Pupils will demonstrate a high level of engagement in our phonics lessons and will be confident in using their phonic knowledge and the strategies that they have been taught to read and write.  Pupils will make progress through the different phases of phonics in line with Year Group expectations.  Pupils start their reading journey at different levels and individual progress is acknowledged. We want pupils to be working at the expected level with progress measured by the Phonics Screening Test at the end of Year 1. We want pupils to develop a life-long love of reading where they read widely and often, with a good level of fluency and comprehension. 

We have high aspirations for all pupil, which will see them through to further study, work and successful in their adult life.

 

Phonics overview February 2025