Phonics is a way of teaching children how to read and write. It helps children hear, identify and use different sounds that distinguish one word from another in the English language.

Written language can be compared to a code, so knowing the sounds of individual letters and how those letters sound when they’re combined will help children decode words as they read.

Understanding phonics will also help children know which letters to use when they are writing words.

Phonics involves matching the sounds of spoken English with individual letters or groups of letters. For example, the sound k can be spelled as c, k, ck or ch.

Teaching children to blend the sounds of letters together helps them decode unfamiliar or unknown words by sounding them out. For example, when a child is taught the sounds for the letters t, p, a and s, they can start to build up the words: “tap”, “taps”, “pat”, “pats” and “sat”.

How is Phonics Taught?

Introducing young children to the joy and wonder of books requires a systematic teaching of phonics, and we use Floppy's Phonics for this.

Floppy's Phonics - Systematic Synthetic Phonics

The Floppy’s Phonics 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)