St Jude's Church of England Primary School

Phonics

On average, students make 12 months’ progress in six months and the incidence of reading difficulties has been reduced from the typical 20-25% to less than 3% - Optima

Phonics at St. Peter's is taught in separate 15-17 minute sessions at least twice in a day. Distributed learning like this means that skills are regularly repeated and this helps the pupils consolidate their understanding so they move to accuracy and fluency at a rapid rate.

Framework for Teaching 

Each session is broken down into skills building and applied learning with the children focusing in short bursts on synthesis and segmentation, phonic awareness and high frequency word recognition.  These skills are then applied through further reading and writing activities across all subjects. 

We use decodable and real books to offer opportunities to embed rich vocabulary and phonetic awareness, which feeds into pupil writing.  

Learning to read should be a shared experience. In Reception, Year 1 and Year 2 we encourage parents/carers to join us every morning and spend 15 minutes reading with their child.  The more pleasurable the reading experience, the more likely they will quickly develop into independent and inquisitive readers.  

In Key Stage 2, the children enjoy whole class reading sessions every day.  We are ambitious with our choice of books to expose the children to as many different authors and genres as possible.  This can lead to some very stimulating discussions and acts as a catalyst to help our children become stronger writers.

Book Lists

What does it look like in practice?