Phonics

Phonics at St Mary's

Phonics is proven to be the most effective method of teaching children to learn to read as it simplifies the English language down into just 44 sounds. Children therefore 'decode' words by breaking them down into its sounds rather than having to memorise 1,000's of words individually.

At St Mary’s, we teach our children using a rigorous synthetic phonics programme called Floppy’s Phonics. Floppy's Phonics is a beautifully crafted programme that is rigorous, easy-to-use and engages children from the outset, enabling them to learn to read quickly. This wonderful programme teaches the letter/sound correspondences of the English alphabetic code explicitly and comprehensively for reading and spelling. It includes the characters of Floppy the dog, Biff, Chip and Kipper, which engages children fully for the phonics teaching & learning, vocabulary enrichment and language comprehension.

Alongside our programme, we use high quality resources for effective and consistent phonics teaching. Our children engage in fun, multisensory phonics lessons 5 days a week, for 30mins through EYFS to KS1.

Click this link to see how we teach phonics and what we resources we use as part of our Floppy's Phonics programme.

To reinforce the phonics teaching in school, your child may bring home some books and activities to share with you. This includes:

Fully decodable phonics book linked to the sounds/phase they are learning in school.
Floppy Phonics Activity sheet
Say the sounds poster
Grapheme and picture tiles

Each week, every child will receive a Phonics decodable book linked to their phonics level. The child needs to be able to read this book independently as they will contain taught sounds and their corresponding graphemes. To help build fluency, this book needs to be read at least 3 times.

In addition to a decodable phonics books, we will also send home a reading for pleasure book to promote the love of reading. These may need to be read to the children so it is a perfect opportunity to read some great books together.

To help the children consolidate their taught GPCs, they will also receive weekly phonics homework. This part of Floppy's Phonics book bag routine as it allows repeated practice of their activity sheets, at home. This also allows you to see what sounds have been taught in school, which you can then support them with.