At  Holy Trinity RC Primary our teaching of phonics is based on the Bug Club Phonics which is produced by Pearsons.

This is a systematic synthetic phonics programme and is taught daily in Reception, Year 1 and Year 2 and is a scheme on the DFE's 2021 approved phonics teaching programme.

For pupils who need additional support with phonics we also use the intervention scheme Fast Track Phonics. 

The aim of ‘Bug Club’ is very clear – getting all children to read well, quickly. It teaches children to read by identifying the phonemes (smallest unit of sound) and graphemes (written version of the sound) within words and using these to read words. Children experience the joy of books and language whilst rapidly acquiring the skills they need to become fluent independent readers and writers.

What is phonics?

• A method of teaching beginners to read and pronounce words by learning to associate letters or letter groups with the sounds they represent.
• There are 44 main sounds in the English language. Each sound is represented by a grapheme (the written representation of the sound).

Multi-Sensory Approach

We also use a range of activities to support the teaching of phonics, including:

• hand actions/movements to reinforce the sound being learnt or consolidated
• letter cards: to move around on the floor or to put in order, left to right, in a paper ‘pocket’
• whiteboards for writing
• boards with plastic/magnetic letters.

We aim to ensure that the children are physically engaged as active learners, playing many games with them throughout any one phonics session.

We support the teaching of phonics with a range of resources based on this approach, and we ask parents to support this learning at home too.

 

Pronouncing pure sounds

We must use pure sounds when we are pronouncing the sounds and supporting children in reading words. If we mispronounce these sounds we will make reading harder for our children. Below are videos for phases 2 and 3 of the phonics scheme. They demonstrate the pronunciation of a letter and how it should verbally be translated to a sound, it is vital that when children are learning phonics they are producing the sound rather than the letter name.

Here is a video showing correct pronunciation of sounds.