We use the Bug Club Phonics programme to teach phonics as our prime approach to reading and writing. The children learn to hear sounds in words (phonemes) and represent these sounds using letters (graphemes). Phonics is taught as a daily discreet session to all children from YR to Y2 and beyond Y2 for those children who still need this approach. During daily phonics sessions children work practically, playing games and completing fun activities to learn to decode words by segmenting and then blending the sounds together.

Bug Club Phonics is a phonics resource accredited and validated by the Department for Education as a good systematic synthetic phonics programme, in 2021. It aims to build children’s speaking and listening skills in their own right as well as to prepare children for learning to read by developing their phonic knowledge and skills. It sets out a detailed and systematic programme for teaching children phonic skills, with the aim of them becoming fluent readers by age seven. We expect the majority of our pupils to be decoding words accurately by the end of Year 1 and the large majority of pupils to be confident readers by the end of Year 2.

Please click https://www.pearson.com/uk/learners/primary-parents.html to find out more about Bug Cub Phonics.  You can also watch a short 2 minute video below which shows you how to use Bug Club Phonics with your child at home.

At the end of KS1 and through KS2 the children learn spellings through a spelling programme which uses phonics. They investigate words and spelling patterns. All phonics and spelling lessons teach children knowledge and skills and teachers will assess their independent application across the curriculum as readers and writers.

During the school year we run sessions for parents where you have an opportunity to see how we teach phonics and can seek advice about how to support your child at home.

The video below shows you the sound that each phoneme makes. Please not that some vowel sounds will differ depending on regional accents and for most Shropshire speakers the ‘u’ sound will be slightly different to how it appears on this video. Think of how you say the ‘u’ at the beginning of the word ‘umbrella’.