At Hadrian Primary School, we teach phonics using a linguistic phonics programme called Sounds~Write. Sounds~Write is a very highly structured, multi-sensory approach to teaching children to read and spell. Its structure and simplicity makes it a programme accessible to all learners and helps them to make excellent progress with their reading and spelling.

The four key concepts children are taught are:

1. Letters are symbols that represent sounds
2. Sounds can be spelled using 1, 2, 3 or 4 letters
3. The same sound can be spelled in different ways
4. The same spelling can represent different sounds

The three key skills children need to master are:

1. Blending
2. Segmenting
3. Phoneme manipulation

 

What do children learn in Reception?

Children in Reception begin with the Initial Code where they practise all three key skills whilst learning the one-to-one sound-spelling correspondences and securing their understanding of key concept 1. This builds up confidence and phonic knowledge enabling them to read and spell a wide range of words.

At first, children learn to read and spell simple one-syllable words with a consonant-vowel-consonant (CVC) sound structure (for example, ‘sat’). By the end of reception, they can read and write one-syllable words with up to five, or even sic, sounds such as ‘twist’, ‘grand’, ‘scraps’.

Children also develop their knowledge of key concept 2 as they learn to read and spell words containing some sounds spelt with two letters (/sh/ in ‘fish’, /th/ in ‘thin’, for example) as well as the three letter spelling < tch > for the sound /ch/ in ‘watch’. Key concept 3 is introduced towards the end of Reception as the students learn about a small number of sounds that can be spelt in more than one way (for example, /k/ spelt as < k >, < c > and < ck >).

 

What do children learn from Year 1?

Once the Initial Code has been mastered, children continue to practise all three key skills whilst learning the Extended Code and developing key concepts 2, 3 and 4. Learning of the Extended Code is a lifelong process – we all continue to develop our understanding of our alphabetic code whenever we encounter new words. This is why the Sounds-Write approach is used right up to the end of KS2. This includes reading and spelling polysyllabic words of increasing complexity.

Children in Years 1 and 2 develop their code knowledge through explicit, systematic teaching of the Extended Code units. Polysyllabic words are introduced in Year 1.