How we teach phonics
By ensuring high-quality phonics teaching, the government wants to improve literacy levels to:
- give all children a solid base upon which to build as they progress through school
- help children to develop the habit of reading widely and often, for both pleasure and information
At Chickerell Primary Academy we aim for our all of our children to become fluent and confident readers who develop a love of books. To achieve this we teach phonics throughout Reception and key stage one using Read Write Inc. a government validated systematic synthetic phonics programme
written by Ruth Miskin.
Systematic synthetic phonics (SSP) is built on the alphabetic principle. It is a structured, cumulative, and evidence-based method of teaching reading whereby students are taught the link between letters and the speech sounds they represent. Our children learn that sounds (phonemes) are represented by letters (graphemes). We teach children that letter sounds can be blended or 'synthesised' together to form words. The 'synthetic' in SSP means 'composed' or 'built from'. Systematic Synthetic Phonics is a bottom-up approach in that instruction starts not with whole words but with the most basic sound unit - the phoneme. The reading process involves decoding or ‘breaking’ words into separate sounds blended together to read an unknown word.
Please take some time to watch the following video that explains the Read Write Inc. approach.