Phonics
Children in EYFS and Key Stage 1 follow the synthetic phonics approach which we deliver through the 'Floppy's Phonics Sounds and Letters scheme. It’s an approach to teaching phonics in which individual letters or letter sounds are blended to form groups of letters or sounds, and those groups are then blended to form complete words.
Floppy Phonics is divided into six phases, with each phase building on the skills and knowledge of previous learning. Children have time to practise and rapidly expand their ability to read and spell words. They are also taught to read and spell ‘tricky words’ – words with spellings that are unusual or that children have not yet been taught. These include the words ‘to’, ‘was’, ‘said’ and ‘the’ – you can’t really break the sounds down for such words so it’s better to just ‘recognise’ them.
The Floppy’s Phonics Sounds and Letters programme teaches the letter/s-sound correspondences of the English alphabetic code explicitly and comprehensively for reading, spelling and handwriting:
- Systematic and structured with inbuilt rigorous revision to ensure the success of every child
- Includes the characters of Floppy the dog, Biff, Chip and Kipper and their family and friends, with hundreds of colour pictures to engage children fully for the phonics teaching & learning, vocabulary enrichment and language comprehension
- Rigorous teaching sequence ensuring the phonics teaching & learning is straightforward, effective and allows for differentiation in simple, but effective, ways
- Builds up knowledge of spelling word banks over time where words are spelt with the same letter/s-sound correspondences
- Designed to inform parents/carers routinely and to work in partnership with them wherever possible
- The order of introducing the 44 sounds of the English language matches the order in ‘Letters and Sounds’ (DfES, 2007)
