Phonics & Spelling
What is Phonics?
Phonics is the teaching of reading and writing, which develops the learner’s phonemic awareness and ability to hear, identify and manipulate phonemes. As well as the ability to understand the spelling’s patterns that represent themselves.
What Phonic Scheme do we use at John Wesley School?
We use the scheme ‘Supersonic Phonic Friends’. This is a fun and engaging phonics scheme aimed at meeting the needs of every child.
Supersonic Phonics begins in Year R with firm foundations and develops progressively through to Year 2 until the higher levels of Phonics are reached. It aims to build children’s speaking and listening skills in their own right as well as to prepare children for learning to read by developing their phonic knowledge and skills. It is a fully systematic, synthetic programme for teaching phonic skills.
What is Supersonic Phonic Friends?
It is an enchanted adventure of phonics where the children will meet several friendly woodland characters who represent each literacy skills involved. Supported by the children’s new ‘Supersonic Friends’ and rhyming captions and phrases, this approach will ensure children develop confidence and apply each skill to their own reading and writing.
How do we teach Phonics?
The programme begins in Reception Class with Firm Foundations followed by Basics 1,2 and 3. Basic 3 is recapped in Year 1 followed by Basic 4 and the Higher Level Phonics of 'Choose to Use' and 'Switch it Mitch' In Year 2. The High Level Phonics is revisited followed by Year 2 Spelling rules
In Phonics, we teach children that the letters of the alphabet represent different sounds, that these can be used in a variety of combinations and are put together to make words. The children learn to recognise all of the different sounds and combinations that they might see when they are reading or writing.
Sessions are taught daily for 30 minutes and have a clear structure following the model: Revisit & Revise, Teach, Practice and Apply.
Cued Articulation
Alongside our teaching of Phonics we used Cued Articulation. Cued Articulation aims to help children form a visual picture of each sound which they can remember and produce. It is a set of hand cues for teaching individual sounds in a word. The hand movements are logical - each hand movement represents one sound and the cue gives clues as to how and where the sound is produced.
Review and revisit
Children recap on the sounds previously taught. This will consist of a fun activity or game to focus on sounds the children have recently been taught or to look at tricky words.
Teach
This is the part of the lesson where new learning takes place. Children will be introduced to the new phoneme (the way it sounds)and taught how to orally blend and segment words containing that sound. They will be shown the grapheme (the way the sound is written) to represent the sound.
Practice
During this section, children are given the opportunity to read and write words containing the new sound as well as orally spell and blend words with their phonic buddy. They will use a range of resources to embed their new learning; ensuring there is an equal balance of reading writing.
Apply
In every lesson children will be given an application task where they are expected to read and write new words and sounds within a caption or sentence. This allows children to see their new learning in a context and to further embed their vocabulary and fluency. They will also apply tricky words and high-frequency words to their reading or writing.
Within this structure all the children become familiar with the characters and know the roles of their jobs. Children are given an equal balance of reading and writing phonics activities to ensure there is equal weighting to their application of skills.
What does the Supersonic Phonic Friends look like?
Firm foundations
Firm foundations in Phonics offers experience, exposure and enjoyment of sound awareness. This phase is purely about securing a strong sound processing system which is critical to enjoyment and success in children’s later reading and writing skills.
This includes:
Rhythm and rhyme - rhyming stories, rhyming bingo, clapping out the syllables in words and odd one out.
Alliteration – I spy type games and matching objects to the beginning sound
Voice sounds – oral blending and segmenting
Wordless books – to identify parts of a story
Basic 2
The Basics 2 teaches children at least one spelling for 18 of the 44 sounds of the English language.
The characters will help them to remember
Recognise the spellings for the sound with Sam
Segment and build with Seb and Bill
Read and blend with Rex and Ben
Write with Ron
At the end of Basics 2, children will be able to hear up to 3 sounds in a word, recognise spellings and read and write simple CVC words with the 18 spellings for the sounds. They will be able to read decodable texts with The Basics 2 spellings and make phonetically plausible attempts in their emerging stages of spelling in their writing journey.
Sounds included in Basics 2:
s,a,t,p
I,n,m,d
g,o,c,k
ck,e,u,r
h,b,f,ff,l,ll,ss
Basic 3
The Basics 3 teaches children the spellings for the further 26 of the 44 sounds of the English Language. Children will learn their tricky words with Tess and read nonsense words with Nan.
j,v,w,x
y,z,zz,qu
Consonant digraphs: ch,sh,th,ng
Vowel digraphs: ai,ee,igh,oa,oo,ar,or,ur,ow,oi,ear, air, ure, er
Basics 4
The Basics 4 teaches children to be able to hear more than 3 sounds in a word (CCVC or CCCVCC). They will continue to embed their mastery of The Basics 1 and 2 spellings for sounds in words and progress to 4, 5 and 6 sounds in a word.
The Higher Levels of Phonics
The higher level of Phonics teaches children the concept that there can be more than one spelling for a sound that they can hear in a word. For example ai and ay. With the help of Choose to Use Suze, they will find out all about ‘sounds the same but looks different’ and 'Switch it Mitch' for 'looks the same but sounds different'. The children are then able to choose to use spelling rules for up to 85 spellings for the 44 sounds of the English Language.
Tricky Words
Throughout each step of the way, the children will be introduced to tricky words. These are words which cannot be blended using known sounds. E.g. the, some, little, we, me, she.
In this section you will find videos and documents to support with using Supersonic Phonic Friends when reading and learning at home.
How do their reading books match their phonics?
All reading books are matched to the sounds children have covered in school to ensure we maximise their ability to apply their new knowledge. These books are read both within school and then sent home for children to further embed the skills.
How do you assess Phonics?
Assessment takes the form of termly whole class trackers to allow staff to easily identify children who are on track, above or if they require extra support to ‘keep up’ in their Phonics and the application of reading and writing.
We believe that children will achieve their best outcomes by following this scheme and will help them to read and write accurately, fluently and automaticity.