How We Teach Phonics


Phonics and Early Reading at Isleham C of E Primary School

Phonics is a way of decoding written letters (graphemes) and spoken sounds (phonemes) to read. At Isleham we follow ‘Little Wandle Letters and Sounds Revised’  – a government approved systematic synthetic phonics programme for the teaching of phonics and early reading.

We believe it is vital children are taught to read as soon as they have started school. We begin our direct teaching of phonics in Reception to ensure our children learn phoneme-grapheme-correspondences quickly which supports them in becoming fluent readers. We continue to support children to develop the skills needed for blending (combining sounds to read words) and segmenting (separating words into separate sounds for writing) alongside the teaching of phoneme-grapheme-correspondences.

Children throughout Reception and Key Stage 1 take part in a daily phonics session. These focus on developing reading, writing and speaking and listening skills. Each Friday, we review the week's teaching to help children to become fluent reading. 

Children are also taught to read and spell ‘tricky words’ – words with spellings that are unusual. These include the words ‘to’, ‘was’, ‘said’ and ‘the’. We teach the children which part of the word is 'tricky.'

Half termly assessments take place in Reception and Key Stage 1 to help inform future teaching and help identify children who have gaps in their phonic knowledge and need additional practice. Daily assessment of learning also takes place within the classroom so staff can quickly identify any children who are in danger of falling behind and provide the appropriate daily 'Keep Up' intervention.

Reading Practice Sessions

Children in Reception, Year 1 and 2 read fully decodable books with an adults 3 times a week during out 'Reading Practice' sessions. These books are then sent home for xhildren to build their reading fluency and showcase their developing skills and phonic knowledge to their parents/carers. 

Children will practice:

  1. - Read 1 - Decoding.
  2. - Read 2 - Prosody.
  3. - Read 3 - Comprehension.


Our reading books in Reception, Year 1 and Year 2 are Little Wandle Letters and Sound Revised Big Cat books.

How can I support my child with Phonics?

Once your child has started their phonics lessons at school, it is important for children to consolidate this learning so that it becomes part of their long-term memory. We help children to consolidate their learning at school and the additional support parents/carers can provide at home is invaluable in ensuring children become confident readers.

Using the correct pronunciation when saying phonemes is vital for supporting children in their reading journey. Please follow this link https://www.littlewandlelettersandsounds.org.uk/resources/for-parents/ and watch the videos demonstrating how to pronounce sounds. Notice how the children don’t add an ‘uh’ sound at the end, so they say: ‘t’ not ‘tuh’. Correct pronunciation of sounds supports children in being able to blend sounds into words so it is important that adults model this accurately.

Here is a list of some of the language we use when teaching children to read. The children are taught the meaning of these words and become confident to use these terms as part of their vocabulary.

Phoneme The smallest unit of sound within a word e.g. ‘sheep’ is made up of 3 phonemes.
“sh-ee-p” (around 44 in the English language depending of regional accent)
Grapheme A grapheme is the written representation of a phoneme.
e.g. the phoneme ‘c’ can be represented by the graphemes ‘c’, ‘k’, ‘ck’, ‘q’ and ‘ch’ as in the words ‘cat’, ‘duck’, ‘kid’, ‘Iraq’ and ‘chord’.
Digraph A digraph is two letters which are used to represent one phoneme e.g. ‘sh’ ‘ai’ ‘er’.
Trigraph A trigraph is three letters which are used to represent one phoneme e.g. ‘air’ ‘ear’ ‘igh’.
Blend Blending is when you put individual phonemes together to read a word.
Segment Segmenting is when you break up a word into it’s individual phonemes.
Tricky word A word which cannot be ‘sounded out’ and read phonetically e.g. ‘the’ and ‘we’.
CVC word Consonant – vowel – consonant e.g. ‘cat’, ‘rain’, ‘mop’ – 3 phonemes.