Phonics and

Spelling Policy

Related Documents: English Policy

Reading Policy

May 2021

Barnston Primary School

PHONICS AND SPELLING POLICY

Rationale

Phonological awareness is one of many interdependent key skills which children need to develop in order to become fluent and confident readers who demonstrate understanding of the range of texts which they have read.

For children to become fluent and effective writers, the ability to spell accurately is a key skill. Competent spellers need to spend less time and energy in thinking about spelling to enable them to channel their time and energy into the skills of composition, sentence structure and precise word choice.

The National Strategies: Support for Spelling Document (2009)

Aims

The school aims to:

Provide a balanced spelling programme.

Ensure that children understand the principles underpinning word construction (phonemic, morphemic and etymological);

Provide opportunities for children to learn, practice and apply their phonemic and morphemic understanding and skills (Appendix A) across the curriculum.

Support and nurture children who apply spelling strategies in order to read fluently with meaning and spell accurately when writing.

Develop children who use phonological awareness selectively from a broad set of reading skills in order to be confident and consummate communicators.

Build pupils’ self-image as spellers, readers and authors.

Objectives

Children recognize phoneme-grapheme (Appendix B) correspondence appropriate to their age and ability.

Children can blend and segment phonemes in order to support their reading or writing.

Children can apply spelling strategies in order to read/decode fluently and spell accurately at an age appropriate level.

Children are confident and increasingly accurate spellers.

Children select and use phonics skills as one of a range of reading skills in order to read fluently and with understanding at an age appropriate level.

Teaching Strategies:

We believe that the most successful teaching requires a range of teaching strategies in order to address the interests and needs of individual learners. Staff carefully select the appropriate strategies in order to reflect and support the ability of individual pupils. The strategies employed may change as a child progresses through school. Children learn skills during discrete phonics and spelling sessions with further opportunities to practice and apply these skills throughout the curriculum.

Structure:

Discrete phonics sessions:

Use planning from Letters and Sounds (Appendix C) and/or National Curriculum 2014 (Appendix D).

Are structured using the four part model (revisit, teach, practice, apply).

Are interactive and well paced.

Employ a variety of resources effectively.

Employ a range of activities and tasks (oral, aural, written and multi-sensory).

All phonics/spelling sessions are approximately 15-20 mins and employ the four part structure as below:

Revisit previous skills.

Teach a new skill (phoneme/grapheme/spelling convention).

Practice that skill (activity or game).

Apply that skill (reading or writing task).

Foundation Stage 2:

Pupils are taught in daily discrete ability groups using Letters and Sounds.

Years 1 and 2:

Pupils are taught in ability groups for four sessions per week using Letters and Sounds and the National Curriculum 2014 (Y2 programme).

Years 3 and 4:

Pupils are taught in ability groups for one or two sessions per week using Letters and Sounds and the National Curriculum (Year 3 and 4 / Key Stage 2 programme), if needed.

Years 5/6:

Pupils are taught in ability groups for one or two sessions per week using Letters and Sounds and the National Curriculum (Year 5 / Key Stage 2 programme), if needed.

Intervention strategies are employed to support those children who are not achieving age appropriate levels of attainment or the expected progress (to include Orretts Meadow Outreach Programme and/or additional overlearning activities of knowledge and skills as deemed appropriate).

Assessment and Record Keeping

The class or group teachers are responsible for maintaining accurate and up to date assessment evidence for individual pupils. Tracking sheets will be used to identify which Phase (Letters and Sounds) a child is working at (up to and including Phase Five).

Assessment is used to inform teaching and learning. Assessment is an ongoing process, which can take many forms such as: questioning, marking of pupil’s writing and testing weekly objectives, termly SPaG assessments/tests or observing a child during a phonics/spelling based activity. On a regular basis each child is also assessed using five key skills as listed below:

Phoneme-grapheme correspondence.

Blending phonemes to read.

Segmenting phonemes to spell (write).

Apply phonemic knowledge/skills to read unknown or non-words.

Applying phonemic knowledge in writing tasks.

Children are tested using statutory materials in Year 1 using the Year 1 Phonics Test and at Year 6 using the Spelling, Punctuation And Grammar test (SPAG).

Home/School Partnership

Parental or carer support is integral in ensuring that every pupil reaches their potential and we seek to involve parents in supporting their child’s reading progress, through effective home/school communication.

We actively encourage parents to read with their children every day or at least five times a week (in KS1 and KS2 books can be changed daily), which is an opportunity to apply phonics knowledge and skills learnt in school.

All pupils are given spellings once a week, which may include up to 10 phonemes, irregular keywords or words that follow a spelling convention. Weekly spellings are used to communicate the focus graphemes/phonemes for the week to parents/carers and provide opportunities for overlearning at home.

In KS1 and KS2 weekly homework tasks provide opportunities to apply new skills and understanding through reading and writing activities.

Resources

We purchase a various resources from a variety of publishers and digital companies in order to provide engaging resources and learning activities. Resources are regularly audited.

Monitoring and Evaluation

The standards of teaching and learning are regularly monitored and reviewed. The evidence gathered is used to form an action plan, which the English co-ordinator will subsequently implement.

Special Educational Needs and Disability (SEND)

Staff liaise closely with the SEND co-ordinator to address the needs of all children, including those identified as having special educational needs or a disability. Support would then be provided through placement on the appropriate stage of the school’s special needs register as well as the development of achievable targets as identified on Personal Targets. Targeted intervention is delivered by Teaching Assistants in the afternoon sessions. Please reference the SEND Policy for additional information.

PHONICS POLICY APPENDICES:

Appendix A: Phonemic, phonological and morphological understanding/skills

Knowledge of the spelling system

In order to spell we need both phonemic knowledge and morphological knowledge.

Phonemic knowledge:

This is the correspondence between letters (graphemes) and sounds (phonemes). It includes knowledge about:

• phonics (e.g. knowledge about letter and sound correspondence, differences between long and short vowels, the identification, segmentation and blending of phonemes in speech and how these influence spelling);

• spelling patterns and conventions (e.g. how the consonant doubles after a short vowel, words with common letter strings but different pronunciations);

• homophones (e.g. words with common pronunciations but different spelling: to, two, too).

• Phonological knowledge. This relates to:

syllables and rhymes; analogy

Morphological knowledge

This is the spelling of grammatical units within words (e.g. horse = 1 morpheme, horses = 2 morphemes). It includes knowledge about:

• root words – contain one morpheme and cannot be broken down into smaller grammatical units (e.g. elephant, table, girl, day) and are sometimes referred to as the stem or base form;

• compound words – two root words combined to make a word (e.g. playground, football);

• suffixes – added after root words, and change the spelling and meaning of a word (e.g. hope – hoping, walk – walked, happy – happiness);

• prefixes – added before a root word, and change the meaning but rarely affect the spelling of a word (e.g. replace, mistake);

• etymology (word derivations) – words in the English language come from a range of sources; understanding the origin of words helps pupils’ spelling (e.g. audi relates to hearing – audible, audience, audition).

Appendix B: Glossary of terms

Term	Definition	Example
phoneme	The smallest unit of sound in a word.	/c/a/t, sh/o/p.
grapheme	A grapheme is a symbol of a phoneme - a letter or group of letters representing a sound.	/t/, /sh/, /igh/
digraph	Two letters which together make one sound.	/sh/, /ch/, /ee/, /ph/, /oa/.
trigraph	Three letters to represent one single sound.	a-e as in cake, or /igh/ as in light, /ear/ as in beard.
segmentation	Means breaking don the individual words within a word - for instance the word ‘crash’ consists of four phonemes: ‘c-r-a-sh’. In order to spell this word, a child must segment it into its component phonemes and choose a grapheme to represent each phoneme.	b-r-a-sh
blending	Means merging the individual phonemes together to say a word. In order to read an unfamiliar word, a child must recognise (‘sound out’) each grapheme, not each letter (e.g. ‘th-i-n’ not ‘t-h-i-n’) and then merge the phonemes together to make the word.	Sh-i-n
Split digraph	As with a digraph when the vowel sound is split by a consonant.	ape= ae is split by the p. wrote = oe is split by the t.

Appendix C: Phonemes/Graphemes Taught (Letter and Sounds)

Letter and Sounds Phase
Phase 1 continuous through Phase 2 - 6 Show awareness of rhyme and alliteration. Distinguish between different sounds in the environment and phonemes. Explore andexperiment with sounds and words.	Phase 1 (7 aspects) Working on: Showing awareness of rhyme and alliteration, distinguishing between different sounds in the environment and phonemes, exploring and experimenting with sounds and words and discriminating speech sounds in words. Beginning to orally blend and segment phonemes.
Phase 2 Working on: Using common consonants and vowels. Blending for reading and segmenting for spelling simple CVC words. Working on: Knowing that words are constructed from phonemes and that phonemes are represented by graphemes. Letter progression: Set 5: h, b, f, ff, l, ll, ss Set 4: ck, e, u, r Set 3: g, o, c, k Set 2: i, n, m, d Set 1: s, a, t, p
Phase 3 (Foundation) Working on: Knowing one grapheme foreach of the 43 phonemes.	Phase 3 (Foundation) Working on: Reading and spelling a wide range of CVC words using all letters and less frequent consonant digraphs and some long vowel phonemes. Graphemes: ear, air, ure, er, ar, or, ur, ow, oi, ai, ee, igh, oa, ooWorking on: Reading and spelling CVC words using a wider range of letters, shortvowels, some consonant digraphs and double letters. Consonant digraphs: ch, sh, th, ng Working on: Reading and spelling CVC words using letters and short vowels. Letter progression Set 7: y, z, zz, qu Set 6: j, v, w, x
Phase 4 (Foundation/Year1) Working on: Segmenting adjacent consonants in words and apply this in spelling. Working on: Blending adjacent consonants in words and applying this skill when reading unfamiliartexts.
Phase 5 (Year 1) Working on: Reading phonically decodable two-syllable and three-syllable words. Working on: Using alternative ways of pronouncing and spelling the graphemes corresponding to thelong vowel phonemes. /ee/ (ee, ea, y, e), /ie/ (igh, y, ie, i-e, i), /oe/ (oa, ow, o-e, o), /ae/ (ai, ay, a-e, a), /ue/ (oo, ew, ue, o), /oo/ (oo, ou, u), /ow/ (ow, ou), /oi/ (oy, oi), /ar/ (ar, a), /au/ (ar, a), /ur/ (er, ir, ur), /air/ (air, are, ear,), /ear/ (ear, eer, ere), /ure/ (ure, our). Working on: Spelling complex words using phonically plausible attempts.
Phase 6 (Year 2) Working on: Recognising phonic irregularities and becoming more secure with less commongrapheme-phoneme correspondences. e.g. /s/ can be represented by 's', 'ss', 'se', 'ce' or 'c' Working on: Applying phonic skills and knowledge to recognise and spell an increasing number of complex words.

Appendix D: Spelling Conventions/Patterns (National Curriculum 2014)

https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/335186/PRIMARY_national_curriculum_-_English_220714.pdf