We teach phonics by following the Twinkl Phonics scheme. This is a fully comprehensive, synthetic phonics teaching programme which has been purposefully designed to be used across the whole school. We place great emphasis on supporting our early readers so every child from Nursery to Year 2 receives daily, discrete phonics teaching which has a protected slot on our weekly timetable. 

Twinkl phonics is an effective, systematic, fun and fast-paced approach to teaching phonics. We chose this phonics programme as it linked closely to Letters and Sounds which we had used previously and so led to an easy and seamless transition. We offer high-quality phonics teaching as all our staff have received the fully accredited Twinkl Phonics training. 

The Four Cornerstones of Phonics

There are four key elements that children need in order to develop into confident and able readers and writers. These are:  

• Rapid recall of Grapheme-Phoneme Correspondences (GPCs)
• Rapid recall of tricky/common exception words
• Efficient blending skills
• Efficient segmenting skills

These are practised everyday as part of our daily teaching structure. We provide the opportunities for children to develop their knowledge, skills and understanding which are all essential for reading and writing. It is also vitally important that children enjoy our phonics sessions and grow in confidence. This is evident by the children's high engagement, perseverance and sheer joy during each of our phonic sessions. The songs are most definitely the highlight and are often requested outside of our phonic sessions! It is wonderful to see our young children develop a love of reading and writing that lays the foundations for life. 

Teaching Structure

As a school we maintain fidelity to the Twinkl phonics scheme by following the same structure in our daily lessons:

• Revisit and Review - Our children review GPC's and previous tricky/common exception words that they have already been taught
• Teach - New GPCs and tricky/common exception words
• Practise - Blending and segmenting words with the new GPCs in
• Apply - Reading or writing a caption or sentence using taught GPCs and tricky/common exception words
• Assess - We assess children throughout the session and summatively at the end of every half term.

We group children across Early Years and KS1 according to their phonics level regardless of their year group. We believe that the children really benefit from high quality teaching within a smaller group at a level that is tailored exactly to their current phonic ability. We believe that it is vital that our children 'Keep up not catch up'. Anyone who has any misconceptions, is working at a slower pace or needs more support receives same day interventions which relates to the particular lesson taught that day. These sessions are prioritised.