Phonics

Sounds-Write is a quality-first phonics programme acknowledged by the DfE as meeting all its criteria for an effective phonics teaching programme. It is an exciting and highly successful approach to the teaching of reading, spelling and writing.

Sounds-Write is highly effective in teaching pupils to read, spell and write because it starts from what all children know from a very early age – the sounds of the English language. From there, children are taught in small steps how each of the 44 or so sounds in the English language can be spelt.

Children begin by learning simple alphabet code and then progress through to more complex coding.

The programme teaches the following concepts:

• that letters are spellings of sounds: visual language is a representation of spoken language.
• that a spelling can contain one, two, three, or four letters – examples are: s a t, f i sh, n igh t and w eigh t.
• that there is more than one way of spelling most sounds: the sound ‘ae’, spelt as in ‘name’, can be represented as in ‘table’, in ‘rain’, in ‘eight’, in ‘play’, and so on.
• that many spellings can represent more than one sound: can be the sound ‘e’ in ‘head’, ‘a-e’ in ‘break’, or ‘ee’ in ‘seat’.

Reading and spelling also requires expertise in the skills necessary to make use of the alphabet code and pupils need to be able to:

• segment, or separate sounds in words.
• blend, or push sounds together to form words.
• manipulate sounds: take sounds out and put sounds into words.

We have invested heavily in training for teachers and teaching partners across the school so the programme can be delivered to a high standard with fidelity. Within the programme there is strong link between the sounds the children are learning and how we represent them in writing.

The method is multi-sensory, which is to say that children are taught to discriminate the exact shapes of letters, by looking at them and copying them, as well as by saying the precise sounds they represent in speech.

Statutory assessment

• All Year 1 children will participate in the national phonics screening check which takes place in June. In this test they are asked to read 20 real and 20 ‘pseudo’ words to test their phonic knowledge.
• Children who do not attain the threshold score are will participate in the screening check in June the following academic year (i.e Year 2).

The sounds of English

If you’re not sure how to say the sounds of the Initial Code accurately, listen to the delightful way they are spoken by children at St Thomas Aquinas Catholic Primary School and copy them.