Phonics
Phonics
Cotgrave Candleby Lane School has adopted the Flying High English Hub approach to phonics, using the Letters and Sounds Guidance documentation. Our phonics approach is rigorous, progressive and consistent from FS2 to Year 2 and beyond.
Phonics Lesson
Within FS1, Phase 1 phonic skills are taught and mastered by the children so that they can orally blend and segment. From FS2 to Year 2, we follow a four-part lesson design to structure all of our Phonics lessons. Each lesson includes: Revisit, Teach, Time to Read and Time to Write.
Phonics is taught daily from FS2 to Year 2 by highly skilled teachers. These teachers focus on the 'spot light' children within the sessions while the teaching assistant circulates around the rest of the class, challenging children to read and write the new phoneme correctly.
To find out more about our daily lesson structure, please read 'Overview of Phonics Lesson'.
Terminology and strategies used at CCLS
Phoneme
Smallest unit of sound
Grapheme
The written representation of the phoneme.
Diagraph
When two letters together make one sound.
Trigraph
When three letters together make one sound.
Segmenting
When segmenting a word to spell, the children use robot arms to 'chop' the word up and blend the word back together using a circular motion with their hands. Children also use a CCL phoneme mat to support spelling.
Blending
Sound buttons are used to support blending, these are dots and dashes.
Reading - It is essential that every child leaves CCLS as a reader.
Phonics is the tool that we use to teach children how to read. Therefore, every child who is taught phonics is reading a decodable book (Big Cat Collins).
Teachers carefully match the children's phonics knowledge to the decodable book that they have.
The children are assessed regularly to see which phonemes they know and don't know. The children are then assigned a decodable book to read at home and at school for one week. This gives the children the opportunity to practice reading the book again and again to build up fluency and confidence when reading.
Our 'spotlight' children read 1:1 every day in school with a trained teaching assistant. To read more about what this looks like at CCLS, take a look at our 'Overview of 1 to 1 Reading'.
As Reading for Pleasure is also a key priority at CCLS, children who are reading decodable books also have the opportunity to take a book home to share with their family. Each class teaching phonics has a timetabled slot to go into the schools libraries and choose one of these stories.
If you would like to know any more information about Phonics at CCLS, then please request a copy of our Phonics Policy or speak to our Early Reading Lead, Mrs Tyler.