At Fairway, we know that high quality phonics teaching and learning is vital to children’s success with reading and writing.

We use the 'Song of Sounds' phonics scheme. The 'Song of Sounds' is a hands-on systematic synthetic phonics programme that makes phonics fun, memorable and accessible for all learners.

Each year group, from EYFS to Year 2, has their own 'Song of Sounds' which teaches the children all of the phonemes necessary to read and spell words successfully and builds upon the previous year's learning. The children sing the song every day and use actions and pictures to reinforce their learning.

Each week the children learn phonics through four 30 minute daily sessions and a longer consolidation session at the end of the week to apply their phonics skills through creative games and interactive activities that promote reading and spelling.

Whilst phonics is taught explicitly, on a daily basis, it permeates through the entire curriculum with the expectation that the children will apply their learning in all subjects.

Children begin learning the ‘Song of Sounds’ during their first few weeks in Reception and progress through the programme throughout Years 1 and 2. In Reception children learn the 26 sounds that the letters of the alphabet make as well as 15 digraphs and 2 trigraphs. In Year 1 the children progress to learning alternative ways of representing long vowel sounds and many other digraphs. By Year 2, the children learn alternative spellings to known phonemes so that they can read and spell increasingly complex words.

Through the teaching of phonics, the children learn:

• Grapheme-phoneme correspondences (GPCs) quickly and in an appropriate order
• How to blend sounds to read words i.e. d-o-g blends together to make dog
• How to segment words for spelling i.e. cat segments into c-a-t
• How to read and spell tricky words (common exception words) i.e. they, me, people and identify which part of the word is tricky, and why
• To read decodable books accurately and with increasing fluency
• To apply their phonics skills when reading and writing across the curriculum

Useful information for parents

Useful websites with games and activities for children