Phonics

 Essential Letters and Sounds (ELS) is our chosen Phonics programme. The aim of ELS is to get all children to read well, quickly. It teaches children to read by identifying the phonemes (the smallest unit of sound) and graphemes (the written version of the sound) within words and using these to read words. Essential Letters and Sounds is a systematic synthetic phonics programme and was validated by the Department for Education in June 2021.

All EYFS & KS1 members of staff are trained to teach ELS to ensure that we have an expert team of reading teachers led by our Reading/Phonics Lead. As a staff team, we regularly meet to review our practice and to practise teaching together. This ensures that all children receive high-quality first teaching every day. Our classrooms are well resourced to ensure that every child has the resources required to learn to read well.

Reading is at the heart of everything we do. Reading is a central part of every pupil’s life at our school. We instil a love of reading from the very beginning of their education. Every child at our school is a reader and so are their teachers. We believe all children can become confident readers during their time in primary education. Children’s love for reading is evident through their continuous engagement, desire to read for pleasure and their understanding of a range of texts, authors and illustrators and this is further developed throughout our reading curriculum.

To ensure all children learn to read well, quickly, children learn Phonics from the very start of Reception. It is explicitly taught every day during a dedicated slot on the timetable. Throughout the day, children use their growing Phonic knowledge to support them in other areas of the curriculum and have many opportunities to practise reading decodable texts precisely matched to their phonic knowledge. This includes reading 1:1 with a member of staff, with a partner during paired reading and during whole-class reading session.

At (Hannah Ball we begin by teaching the single letter sounds before moving to diagraphs (two letters spelling one sound), trigraphs (three letters spelling one sound) and quadgraphs (four letters spelling one sound). We teach children to: • Decode by identifying each sound within a word and blending them together to read fluently • Encode by segmenting each sound to write words accurately.