As readers and writers, our INTENT is:

 

And we IMPLEMENT this by:

 

The IMPACT of this is:

PHONICS and EARLY READING

How Phonics is Taught at St Alban’s CE Primary School

Our Approach to Early Reading and Phonics

At St Alban’s CE Primary School, we are committed to providing high-quality phonics teaching that enables every child to become a confident, fluent reader. We follow the Essential Letters and Sounds (ELS) phonics programme with personalised, appropriate variation to the scheme to ensure a consistent, structured and engaging approach across the school.

The principles of ELS are based upon:

• The delivery of whole-class, high-quality first teaching with well-structured daily lesson plans
• The use of consistent terminology by teachers, children and parents
• The use of consistent resources that support effective teaching
• Repetition and reinforcement of learning
• Regular and manageable assessment to ensure that all children ‘keep up’ rather than ‘catch up’

Key Principles of Our Phonics Teaching

Following the ELS Progression

• We teach grapheme–phoneme correspondences (GPCs), blending, segmenting, and tricky words following the clear and systematic progression set out in Essential Letters and Sounds (ELS).
• This ensures that children build on their knowledge step-by-step and make secure progress in both reading and writing.

Structured ELS Sessions

• Daily phonics sessions follow the ELS session structure, providing consistency and familiarity.
• Paired reading in class using books from the program. ‘Eyes on text’ reading to be implemented weekly as per program.
• Assessment and consolidation weeks are built into the programme to identify children’s next steps and reinforce learning.

Keeping Sessions Active and Engaging

We use some of the ELS slides, but not all, so that:

• The amount of time children spend looking at a screen is minimised.
• A fast pace and high levels of engagement are maintained.
• Lessons are lively, interactive, and focused on active participation.
• Use of ELS actions for blending, such as robot arms and the ‘stre-e-e-e-tch’ action, are used to ensure learning is visual and active for all learners.

Strategies to Support Learning

• For GPC (Sound–Symbol Recognition) – use of ELS mnemonics and large flashcards to help children remember new sounds.
• For Blending (Reading Words) – use of the “Robot Arms” strategy to help children hear and blend sounds together to read words.
• For Segmenting (Spelling Words) – use of “Robot Arms” and “Stretching the Word” to support children as they segment words for writing.

Applying Phonics in Context

• We create our own engaging activities to help children apply the sounds and words they have learnt in meaningful contexts.
• We avoid using worksheet books, focusing instead on practical, purposeful learning experiences that develop real reading and writing skills.

Our Goal

Through our consistent, personalised use of the ELS phonics approach, we aim for all children to:

• Develop a strong foundation in phonics.
• Become fluent, confident readers.
• Enjoy a lifelong love of reading.

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GPC Charts

HANDWRITING

At St Alban's we are very proud of the progress our children make with their handwriting and the particular care they take with their handwriting style.

We use Letter-Join’s online handwriting resource (https://www.letterjoin.co.uk/) and Lesson Planners as the basis of our handwriting policy as it covers all the requirements of the National Curriculum.

Please encourage your child to use this letter formation in all writing they complete at home.

Handwriting is a basic skill that influences the quality of work throughout the curriculum. By the end of Key Stage 2 all pupils should have the ability to produce fluent, legible and, eventually, speedy joined-up handwriting, and to understand the different forms of handwriting used for different purposes.

Our intention is to make handwriting an automatic process that does not interfere with creative and cognitive thinking. This is why we teach pre-cursive handwriting from the middle of reception.

Letter-join is a whole school handwriting scheme offering a combination of traditional and digital resources. These include classroom presentations, handwriting activities, online games and hundreds of worksheets using either a printed font (for those in the early stages of writing), and then our chosen cursive font with a lead-in line. 

SPELLING 

At St Alban's we use Spelling Shed's approach to spelling which involves the relationship between sounds and written symbols as well as using morphology to help spell through meaning.

The carefully selected word lists and engaging activities provide opportunities to incorporate phonics and meaning to strengthen spelling skills and build vocabulary acquisition.

Each lesson…

• includes more features to enhance the teaching and learning in your setting.
• is designed to be flexible to fit within the variable timetables that schools have.
• has main teaching inputs, which can then be followed up with additional activities that can be carried out immediately after the input during an extended session or revisited throughout the week in order to consolidate the learning further.
• has elements of the key areas below embedded in its core.

Orthography

“Orthography is how patterns of letters are used to make certain spoken sounds in a language.”

In the new Spelling Shed lessons, students will continue to build on the firm foundations built whilst studying phonics in their early years of education. They will continue to break down spellings into the smallest units of sound and cluster them into syllables in order to read and write words efficiently.

Through adult-led discussion and investigation children will become more secure in their knowledge of English orthography based on the frequency and position of the sounds within words.

Morphology

“Morphology describes how words are structured into subcomponents to give meaning.”

Children will study words; word parts; their meanings and how this affects spelling.

There are lessons throughout the scheme that consolidate children’s knowledge of common morphemes such as root formations, prefixes and suffixes.

Etymology

“Etymology describes the origins of words, which can lead to certain patterns of spelling.”

Most lessons in the scheme include an etymology element that allows educators to teach the children about the origin of the words that they are learning about.

Children will be able to see how the English language has, over time, borrowed and integrated words and spellings from a range of source languages. For example, the latinate verbs which follow Latin prepositions in English words such as: -act (do), -pute (think) or -opt (choose).

READING

At St Alban's CE Primary School, children learn to read in English sessions and to apply and develop these skills across the entire curriculum. In whole class discussions (Book Talk) and in small guided groups, children learn to discuss and develop their understanding of fiction and non-fiction texts with a specific focus on developing reading fluency and stamina.

Classroom book corners are well resourced with engaging, up-to-date texts which invite the children to read widely and develop a love of reading. We also have a very well-equipped, inviting library which is open to children during lunch breaks and for classes to visit regularly.

Our planning follows the HIAS English 3 Phased Approach and the Pen Portraits for each year group.

WRITING

Our planning follows the HIAS English 3 Phased Approach and the Pen Portraits for each year group.

Stimulate and Generate, Capture, Sift and Sort and Create, Refine and Evaluate.

Teachers will model writing construction at all stages, ensuring the metacognitive processes are shared, whether this is one sentence or a complete form.

Stimulate and Generate: is an opportunity to delve into the text driver (this can be a film, a poem, an advert, a novel, a non-fiction text etc.) and become immersed in the world through discussion, drama and book talk.

Capture, Sift and Sort is a time for children to practise the skills needed to write. This includes grammar, sentence construction, spelling and phonics as well as the opportunity to write at length during one, or more apprentice writes.

During the Create, Refine and Evaluate stage, children will draft, write and evaluate their ‘final’ outcome; teachers will model as appropriate and address misconceptions throughout.