Welcome to St Raphael’s Phonics Page!
On this page you will find lots of information about the teaching of phonics at St Raphael’s. Some of the presentations may take a few moments to load so please stick with us!
The children can also access some websites that offer games to consolidate their phonic knowledge. Some of the games they will be familiar with as they are used in their daily phonic sessions.
What is phonics and why is it important?
Phonics is a method for teaching reading and writing by developing learners’ phonemic awareness—the ability to hear, identify, and manipulate phonemes —in order to teach the correspondence between these sounds and the spelling patterns (graphemes) that represent them.
The goal of phonics is to enable beginning readers to decode new written words by sounding them out, or in phonics terms, blending the sound-spelling patterns.
At St Raphaels, we use a synthetic phonics programme called “Letters and Sounds”. This is introduced in Nursery and progresses through to Year 2. This is a very structured programme which is followed 4 to 5 times a week.
What is the Phonics Screening Test?
The Year 1 phonics screening check is an assessment to confirm whether children have learnt phonic decoding to an appropriate standard.
It will identify the children who need extra help so they are given support by their school to improve their reading skills. They will then be able to retake the check so that schools can track pupils until they are able to decode.
The key to successful phonics is the correct pronunciation – if children perfect this then blending, or sounding a word out, becomes a lot easier.
