‘Phonics is a highly effective method of teaching word reading. Almost all children who receive high-quality phonics teaching will learn the skills they need to tackle new words. They can then go on to read any kind of text fluently and confidently, and to read for enjoyment.’

In Year 1, the children take part in daily phonics lessons. We teach four new sounds a week and have a review lesson on a Friday. In the Autumn term the Year 1 children will recap the Phase 2, 3 and 4 sounds. They will then learn the Phase 5 sounds. During this phase, the children will learn the alternative graphemes for sounds introduced in Reception.

For more information on how our phonics journey progresses in year 1, click the links below.

• Information for parents and carers year 1

We assess your child every half term to check their progress. Any child who needs extra support has daily keep-up sessions planned for them.

As part of the Little Wandle programme, the children read the same book three times a week.

• The first time we work on decoding (sounding out) the words.
• The second time we work on prosody, which is reading with expression and using our story-teller voice.
• The third time we focus on comprehension skills.

We read the books three times at school because we want to develop the children’s fluency. The more they see the words the more they begin to read them automatically without having to sound them out.

This means that your child should:

• Know all the sounds and tricky words in their phonics book well
• Read many of the words by silent blending (in their head) – their reading will be automatic
• Only need to stop and sound out about 5% of the words by the time they bring the book home – but they should be able to do this on their own

Terminology:

• Digraph: A grapheme using two letters to represent one phoneme. With children, we frequently reinforce it with the mantra ‘two letters, one sound’ for example ‘ay’.
• Trigraph: A grapheme using three letters to represent one phoneme. With children, we frequently reinforce it with the mantra ‘three letters, one sound’ for example ‘igh’.
• Blend: To combine individual phonemes into a whole word, working all the way through from left to right.
• Segment: To identify each of the individual phonemes in a word, working all the way through from left to right. This is an important first stage of writing (spelling) a word but needs to be practised orally first