Phonics

At St. George’s Primary School, we use the ‘Sounds-Write’ linguistic phonics programme to teach phonics. It takes children on a journey from simple to complex words through structured and multi-sensory teaching for reading and spelling.

Sounds-Write enables us to teach the skills, concepts and code knowledge which our children need to master in order to become competent readers, writers and spellers.

The skills which need to be mastered are: segmenting, blending and phoneme manipulation. This takes place alongside conceptual understanding: sounds represent letters and vice versa, sounds can be spelled using a variety of letters, the same sound can be spelled in different ways and the same spelling can represent different sounds.

Our early years foundation stage children learn the Initial Code and once this has been mastered, they move through the Extended Code within Key Stage 1. Children can then apply their phonics knowledge to reading and writing monosyllabic and polysyllabic words and this continues into Key Stage 2.

We encourage all of our parents to participate in the free Sounds Write course aimed at those supporting our children at home and this will help to ensure a consistency of approach. The course can be found here:

John Walker | Sounds-Write literacy | Udemy

To help with the articulation of sounds for our Sounds Write scheme:

Alex saying the sounds Sounds-Write Initial Code - YouTube