At Trythall Community School we use Bug Phonics (validated scheme) to teach phonics across the school.

The Bug Phonics programme is designed for daily use from the beginning of Reception, enabling children to make a smooth transition from Reception to Key Stage 1. The daily lesson plans cover all the main Grapheme–Phoneme Correspondences (GPCs) and Common Exception Words (CEWs) to provide children with the phonic knowledge and skills required for success in the Year 1 Phonics Screening Check.

What is phonics?

Synthetic Phonics is an integrated approach to word reading that explicitly teaches the correspondences between individual letters or groups of letters and their related sounds (graphemes and phonemes), as well as the skill of blending the individual sounds together to read whole words. This skill can then be inverted so that words can be broken down (segmented) into their component sounds in order to spell them. Much evidence has been collated in recent years to show that teaching children to read words using Synthetic Phonics has a positive effect on children’s long-term ability to read and comprehend text (especially for those younger children who might otherwise have been identified as being in danger of falling behind).

Although it is true that many English words are not entirely phonically regular, the fact remains that around 50 per cent of words are completely decodable if the reader has the necessary toolkit of GPCs (and of the remaining words, the majority have only one sound, usually a vowel sound, that is not regular). This means that if we teach children to read words using a synthetic
phonics approach, we are equipping them to read, at first try, at least half of all words in the English language and to have a good chance of working out the tricky GPC in most of the remaining words.

A phoneme is defined as the smallest unit of sound into which a spoken word can be broken down. For example, in the word ‘cat’ there are three phonemes /c/ … /a/ … /t/. In this example, each phoneme is represented by a grapheme comprised of one letter. The word ‘cheese’, in contrast, also comprises three phonemes /ch/ … /ee/ … /z/, but in this instance, the graphemes
that represent the phonemes each have two letters: ‘ch’, ‘ee’, ‘se’. Graphemes can be comprised of either one, two or three (very occasionally four) letters and there will always be the same number of graphemes in a word as there are phonemes.

In a synthetic phonics programme such as Success for All Phonics, children are first taught the most common GPCs in the English language so that they can quickly begin to apply this knowledge to read whole words (blending), and soon after, to spell them (encoding). Over the course of the programme, they will be introduced to a number of alternative ways of representing the same phonemes, including some of the less-common GPCs.

Teaching Sequence

An example of the teaching sequence is below (for Reception class).

We have very clear expectations about what sounds will be taught and when, alongside which common exception words will also be taught.  These are then matched to your child's reading book (based on the phonic knowledge they have secured) in order for them to continue to practise these skills when reading (both at home and in school).