Elizabeth Selby Infants' School

At Elizabeth Selby Infant School, we use THE Partnership Phonics Programme. This is a systematic synthetic phonics programme based on ‘Letters and Sounds’ which promotes the use of phonics as the prime route to reading unknown words, the programme is validated by the DfE. 

All children will receive decodable books that are closely matched to their phonics knowledge. These books are read at school, during guided reading and taken home to read.

We use the Pearson Phonics Bug

THE Partnership Phonics Programme is taught daily across the school. Lessons are sequences as this enables children to read and spell many words early on. It progresses from simple to more complex phonic knowledge and skills, cumulatively covering all the major GPCs (grapheme-phoneme correspondences) in English. This aims for children to meet or exceed the expected standard in the Year 1 Phonics Screening Check and all national curriculum expectations for word reading through decoding by the end of KS1.

There are four key concepts that we teach to all pupils, these are:

1. Letters are symbols (spellings) that represent sounds.

2. A sound may be spelled by one, two, three or four letters:

E.g. dog   street   night   eight

3. The same sound can be spelled in more than one way:

E.g. rain   acorn   cake   day

4. Many spellings can represent more than one sound:

E.g. head   seat   break

There are three key skills that we teach to all pupils, these are:

1. Blending: the ability to push sounds together to build words.

2. Segmenting: the ability to pull apart the individual sounds in words.

3. Phoneme manipulation: the ability to insert sounds into and delete sounds out of words.

Tricky Words:

Tricky words enable children to read texts. These words cannot be sounded out using phonics and are words that the children will come across in many books. 

For example:

I        go        to        into        was     the

Tricky words are built into each phase of the programme. 

Each lesson is built around direct teaching sessions (revise, hear, read, write, apply), with extensive teacher-child interaction.  Throughout each session, children are expected to actively engage in the learning. The lesson structure provides a consistent approach where children know what is coming next and minimum time is spent explaining new activities. 

Assessment is carried out at regular intervals with top-up sessions provided to support children who are at risk of falling behind.