Subject Leader: Miss Mulholland
Our Curriculum Drivers
Intent
Our aim at St Mary’s is to deliver high-quality daily phonics lessons to ensure that children develop the key skills that they need to become fluent, confident readers quickly. This is through daily discrete phonics teaching that develops children’s letter and sound recognition, blending and segmenting skills, spelling skills and word and sentence reading skills, building towards reading fluency.
Implementation
We teach phonics using the validated systematic synthetic programme ‘Rocket Phonics’. Rocket phonics is a story-based approach to the teaching of phonics. Phonics is taught daily in Early Years and Key Stage 1.
Every phonics lesson is taught using this format:
- Review and Revisit: The children recap previously taught sounds.
- Teach: Using online teaching storybooks, the children learn a letter-sound correspondence in the context of a story
- Practise: The children practise reading and/or writing skills using a pupil practise booklet
- Apply: Using fully-decodable practise books throughout the week, the children apply the phonics skills that they have learnt.
Our phonics curriculum follows this progression of sounds and common exception words:
The half termly reading book expectations are:
Impact
Our phonics curriculum should ensure that children leave St Mary’s:
- With a life-long love of reading
- As competent readers who can access a wide range of literature
- Able to reference a range of different authors and texts
- Having made the best possible progress as a result of consistent, quality first teaching
How to support your child at home?
At St Mary’s, we believe that a strong home-school partnership is key to successful learning across the curriculum.
You can support your child’s learning at home by:
- Saying the sounds that they have learnt in school using Rocket Phonics sounds mats
- Reading words containing the sounds that they have learnt
- Practising reading and writing common exception words
- Reading your child’s Rocket Phonics decodable books with them
