At Harbinger we believe that all children have the right to become successful learners, confident individuals and responsible citizens. As such we are committed to ensuring that all children have the opportunities to become confident, enthusiastic and motivated readers and writers. We believe that phonics provides the foundations of learning to make the development into fluent reading and writing easier. Through daily, systematic and consistent high quality phonics teaching, children learn to segment words to support their spelling ability and blend sounds to read words. To allow our children to develop a strong phonic awareness and effective blending and decoding skills, we have chosen to follow THE Partnership Phonics Programme.

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In Key Stage 1, children are assessed at the start of the year and streamed into phonics groups according to the appropriate phase of letters and sounds. These groups are regularly assessed to ensure that all children having their phonics needs met.

There are six phases within the Letters and Sounds programme: –

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Phase 1:

Activities are divided into seven aspects. Environmental Sounds, Instrumental Sounds, Body Sounds, Rhythm and Rhyme, Alliteration, Voice Sounds and finally Oral Blending and Segmenting.
 

Phase 2:

Learning 19 letters of the alphabet and one sound for each. Blending sounds together to make words. Segmenting sounds into their separate sounds. Beginning to read simple captions.

 

Phase 3:

The remaining 7 letters of the alphabet, one sound for each. Digraphs such as “ch”, “oo” and “th” representing the remaining phonemes not covered by single letters. Reading captions, sentences and questions.

 

Phase 4:

No new grapheme-phoneme correspondences are taught in this phase. Children learn to blend and segment longer words with adjacent consonants, e.g. swim, clap, jump.

 

Phase 5:

Children learn more graphemes for the phonemes which they already know, plus different ways of pronouncing the graphemes they already know.

 

Phase 6:

Working on spelling, including prefixes and suffixes.

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Children are expected to have covered Phases 1-3 in the EYFS so that they may start Phase 4 at the beginning of year 1. By Autumn 2, they are ready to begin Phase 5. Phase 6 is expected to start at the end of Year 1 and on into Year 2.

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"Leaders have a strong focus on pupils learning to read from when they first enter Reception"

- Ofsted, 2023