Aims

• For pupils to be independent and accurate readers and spellers, who are confident to recognise/blend and remember/segment a wide range of words when reading and writing.

We, therefore, aim for pupils to be able to:

• 'have a go' at reading and spelling words for themselves, using the skills of blending and segmenting.
• read and write an increasingly wide range of words accurately from memory (focusing especially on phonetically regular words and words from high frequency word lists).
• use a range of strategies to enable them to learn spellings.
• investigate spelling patterns/rules.

We strive to teach Phonics sessions that are well paced, impactful and foster a love of reading and writing. We follow a structure of revisit/review, teach, practise apply to develop confidence in an enjoyable and contexualised way. Phonics is the prime approach to early reading and writing. When children come across unfamiliar words, they are taught to use phonics skills and knowledge first to decode or spell the word.

At Chatsworth we follow Lesley Clarke's Letters and Sounds, a DfE validated SSP programme for teaching phonics across the school.

The programme was written by Lesley Clarke, an experienced infant class teacher and literacy consultant. The scheme has a very close alignment to Letters and Sounds, which Chatsworth had used as the basis of our Phonics teaching for many years.