Letters and Sounds
Principles and Practice of High Quality
Phonics
Six Phase Teaching Programme
throughout the EYFS and Key Stage 1
What is Letters and Sounds?
• Designed to foster children’s speaking
and listening skills as a preparation to
learning phonic knowledge and skills
• Developed in accordance with the DfE
criteria for ‘high quality phonic work’
• Teaches high quality phonics from entry
into reception, at a generally fast pace
but taking into account the capabilities
of the individual child
Making a good start- Phase One
• Phase 1 – develops speaking and listening
skills to pave the way for children to
make a good start on reading and
writing
• Provides a broad and rich language
experience for each child through
story, rhyme, drama and song
• Begins the process of blending and
segmenting words orally
Phase 2- on entry to reception
• Short daily sessions (building up to 20
mins)
• Opportunities given to use and apply
knowledge and skills throughout the day
• Fast paced
• Multi sensory approach
Multi Sensory Learning
Children will
• Recognise letters by touch, sight and
sounding out simultaneously
• Manipulate letters from the start to form
words
• Compose words using letter cards or
magnetic letters before they may be able
to write
• Build up knowledge of grapheme - phoneme
correspondence systematically
Phase 2
• Marks the start of systematic phonics
• Introduces 19 letters
• Teaches decoding for reading (blending
sounds)
• Teaches encoding for spelling (segmenting
sounds)
• Children read and spell VC and CVC words
• Read and write Phase 2 sentences and
captions
• Learn high frequency and tricky words
Phase 3
• Completes teaching of the alphabet
including names of letters
• Introduces consonant and vowel digraphs
• Revisits all sounds previously learned
• Continues blending and segmenting all
GPCs
• Introduces more tricky words and high
frequency words
• Uses ‘sound buttons’
Phase 4
Children learn to read and spell words using
adjacent consonants
CVCC - best, fact
CCVC - grip, glad
CCVCC - stand, crisp
CCCVC - strap
CCCVCC – strand
Polysyllabic words – chimpanzee, shampoo
Revise all previously learned sounds
Read and write Phase 4 sentences, captions and tricky
words
• Learn more high frequency words by sight
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Phase 5- beginning of year 1
• 21 new graphemes
• Alternative pronunciations of known
graphemes eg. ‘low’ instead of ‘owl’
‘head’ instead of ‘sea’
• Phonemes which can be spelled in more
than one way eg. air, pear, bare, lay
• New phoneme ‘zh’ - treasure
Phase 6- beginning of year 2
On entering Phase 6 children should
• Recognise many high frequency words
• Decode quickly and silently because sounding
and blending is well established, recognising
digraphs and not sounding them out as individual
letters
• Decode some harder words aloud
• Have phonemically accurate spelling although
spelling usually lags behind reading
• Read longer texts independently and with
increasing fluency
Phase 6
Phase 6 focuses on
• Introducing and teaching the past tense
• Adding suffixes
• Investigating how adding suffixes and prefixes
changes words
• Teaching spelling of complex words
• Finding and learning the ‘difficult’ bits in words
• Choosing the right grapheme from several
possibilities
• Applying rules learned to their individual
writing including proof reading