Welcome to Wyburns

1. Welcome to Wyburns The aim of this workshop is to demonstrate the impact of phonics on reading and how we deliver a phonetic programme at Wyburns Primary School

2. Early Literacy Development • A really controversial topic in primary school children is literacy. Since the discovery that in 2006 118,000 children left primary school in the UK unable to read (channel 4.com/lost for words), there have been numerous debates on the subject. The problem is how to tackle this mammoth task. Every child deserves to be a functional reader. This problem was highlighted when in 2006 Sir Jim Rose, former Director of Inspection at Ofsted, completed his independent review of the teaching of early reading. The review report provided clear recommendations of what constitutes ‘high quality phonics work’. All principles underpinning these recommendations have now been incorporated into the revised primary framework for literacy (in effect from September 2007) and the Early Years Foundation Stage (from September 2008). Schools, therefore, have a legal obligation to follow the amended curriculum as a direct result of Rose’s findings. Extensive research in this area has shown that systematic phonics is essential to English as it provides young learners the best route to becoming skilled readers.

3. Systematic Phonics • At Wyburns we follow the Letters and Sounds programme for delivering high quality phonics to the children. This programme provides a systematic framework to ensure progression. In reception there is a daily phonics session where sounds are revised, taught, practised and applied.

4. Using Letters and Sounds In reception,the programme is delivered using Jolly Phonics. Jolly Phonics is a thorough foundation for reading and writing. It uses the synthetic phonics method of teaching the letter sounds in a way that is fun and multi-sensory. Children learn how to use the letter sounds to read and write words.

5. We also play lots of games to reinforce the children’s knowledge. ‘I spy’ is a good game for you to play at home as your child will be identifying the initial sound in a word. In addition providing your child with opportunities to apply their knowledge would really help them. Opportunities like writing notes or looking at signs are great.

6. How we progress The five basic skills for reading and writing are: • 1. Learning the letter sounds • 2. Learning letter formation • 3. Blending and segmenting • 4. Identifying sounds in words • 5. Spelling the tricky words

7. Before a child can begin the task of segmenting words into sounds, he needs to develop ‘word consciousness’ – that is that sentences are not a continuous stream of sound but are separable into words (Liberman and Liberman; 1990).

8. In order for children to be aware of different sounds it is important that in the early stages we concentrate on how words sound and not how they are spelt. The English language is tricky and has lots of anomalies that are taught as the children's knowledge grows. • Sample of writing • Spring 09

9. End of Autumn 1 • At this stage children will begin to be able to identify which sound is heard at the beginning, end or middle of a word. Some children will also be able to match that sound to its grapheme (letter name). We look at blending the sounds we have learnt to create CVC words such as s-a-t, sat. This is taught in conjunction with tricky words that do not follow any pattern such as ‘the’ and ‘of’.

10. Different spelling patterns are taught across the phases (3-6 letters and sounds) and children are encouraged to look out for digraphs and trigraphs (sound clues). A digraph has two letters (graphemes) and one sound (phoneme) such as ‘ee’. A trigraph has three letters and one sound such as ‘igh’

11. In Reception a daily phonic session can last between half an hour to an hour depending on the children’s needs. We practise new sounds using the songs and stories in Jolly phonics as well as forming the letters in the air and on whiteboards. We apply our new knowledge in games identifying the new sound. We then finish with our words of the week and class blending and segmenting of these.

12. By the end of reception the expectation issued by the government is that 80% of the cohort will be secure in all 44 sounds (phonemes) and be able to spell and read a wide range of CVC words. As a region Essex falls short of that at 52% in 2009, but as a school, Wyburns achieved 80% of the cohort 2008-2009.

13. By Year 1 the children are then ready to apply their knowledge to their literacy lessons enabling them to concentrate on new skills. Phonics is still taught daily but for a shorter refresher session. The children focus on reading decodable two and three syllable words and spelling complex words.

14. By Year 2 the children will be working on using all the skills they have learnt to enable them to spell and read (encode and decode) more complex words as well as recognising phonic irregularities. A phonic session takes place at the beginning of the daily literacy lesson. The focus of this will be dictated by the children’s needs. Much of this session uses whiteboards to aid letter formation.

15. Any questions? • If you have any questions please let either your class teacher or Miss Fagence know.