Phonics at College Town

At College Town we have a unique community of children; highly mobile and bringing a wealth of diversity and richness to the school. We believe, that for all our children to become fluent readers and writers, phonics must be taught through a systematic and structured phonics programme. Our current programme – linked to Letters and Sounds, has been adapted and extended in this school year, to bring it in line with new guidance and DfE requirements.

It ensures that our children have systematic phonics teaching from the beginning of EYFS to the end of KS1. We aim to foster children’s speaking and listening skills as preparation for learning phonic knowledge and skills.

Our phonics teaching programme shows the progression of GPCs and tricky words that will be taught term-by-term and week by week. This progression is organised so that children are taught from the simple, to more complex Grapheme Phoneme Correspondence (GPC).

Teachers ensure that children review and revise GPCs and words - daily, weekly and across terms and years, in order to help children, memorise and apply phonic knowledge.

You can find out more about our vision and the content of lessons, by looking at the schemes of work below and the PowerPoint.

Please note, that from September 2022, our current programme will be superceded by Little Wandle Letters and Sounds Revised - also a complete systematic synthetic phonics programme (SSP), but newly developed for schools and based on the original Letters and Sounds. This is a programme that we have drawn on, as it has been revised over the past few years. Staff training for this will commence in the summer term.