Phonics
Being able to read is the most important skill for children to learn. There are two strands to learning to read: one is discussion and comprehension, and the other is through high quality phonics education, where children are taught the relationship between sounds and letters in a clear and incremental way.
At Akiva, we follow a systematic synthetic phonics (SSP) programme called Anima Phonics: Letters and Sounds Updated.. ‘Synthetic phonics’ is the process of synthesising (or blending) the sounds of a word together. Children are taught to sound out the graphemes from left to right and blend these sounds together to form the word. The core knowledge underpinning synthetic phonics is the relationship between sounds and letters. This is taught in a systematic and clearly defined, incremental sequence, so that children have time to consolidate and apply their new knowledge.
Anima Phonics: Letters and Sounds Updated encourages children to put their knowledge of letter-sound correspondences to immediate use, by teaching three core skills:
i) Decoding: The ability to sound out (segment) and blend (synthesise) all through the printed word, from left to right, to hear the whole word.
ii) Encoding: The ability to orally divide a spoken word into individual phonemes, then select a grapheme to represent each sound.
iii) Handwriting: The ability to write the correct graphemes (letters) to represent each phoneme.
Anima Phonics: Letters and Sounds Updated is delivered through a multi-sensory approach and is matched to children’s differing needs. Phonics is taught from Reception to Year 2.
In Reception, children are introduced to the correspondences of graphemes (letters) to phonemes (sounds). This enables them to start reading and writing three-phoneme words right from the beginning. Each grapheme-phoneme correspondence (GPC) has a memorable animal mascot and corresponding action. Children then learn the sounds that are represented by more than one grapheme; for example – /oi/ in coin and how to read and write words with adjacent consonants. In the final term in Reception, children begin to learn alternative ways to spell vowel phonemes. For example, the phoneme /ai/ as in ‘rain’ can also be produced with ‘ay’ as in day.
In Year 1, children will learn to identify and use split digraphs. For example, the phoneme /igh/ as in ‘high’ can also be produced with ‘i_e’ as in ‘five’. Further alternative spellings will be then be introduced at a faster pace than previously taught. The children begin to learn the appropriate spelling for different words.
In Year 2, children continue to focus on specific spelling patterns, including adding prefixes and suffixes to a root word and learning common suffixes and word endings. Children are then introduced to more complex elements of the alphabetic code and gain further practice with reading compound words and words of more than two syllables. Finally, they learn how to apply spelling rules in their writing. By the end of Year 2, children should be able to decode most new words accurately and at a speed that is sufficient for them to focus on understanding what they have read.
There are some common words that must be taught before all GPCs have been introduced. In Anima Phonics: Letters and Sounds Updated, these are known as Rainbow Words. Rainbow Words are introduced systematically throughout the programme, beginning just a few weeks into the programme in Reception. Children’s attention is drawn to the ‘tricky’ part of the word that does not fit in with what has been taught so far. This enables them to easily identify the grapheme(s) that make the word an exception word, and to consistently apply their blending skills to unknown words. As children’s knowledge of the alphabetic code increases, many of these high frequency words will become fully decodable.
All children in Reception and Year 1 have discrete, daily phonics lessons where they revise previous learning, are taught new graphemes/phonemes, practise together and apply what they have learnt. Some children may also have extra phonics time to support their learning.
In Reception and Year 1, children are issued phonetically decodable eBooks that match their phonics ability. Practising reading with decodable texts helps ensure children experience success and learn to rely on the phonic strategies they have learnt. In Year 2, children have access to eBooks and a range of texts that match their phonics ability.
Anima Phonics: Letters and Sounds Updated has been validated by the Department for Education. For more information, visit https://www.animaphonics.com/
Rohan Plunkett is the Phonics Subject Leader