Phonics

Essential Letters and Sounds

Essential Letters and Sounds (ELS) is our chosen Phonics programme. The aim of ELS is ‘Getting all children to read well, quickly’. It teaches children to read by identifying the phonemes (the smallest unit of sound) and graphemes (the written version of the sound) within words.

Children begin learning Phonics from Nursery, through ELS Foundation Stage. This programme is designed to foster an increased understanding of vocabulary and language, listening skills and communication with others, awareness of the sounds both within a child’s environment and language, and encourage clear communication and expression.

ELS Phonics is explicitly taught every day in Reception during a dedicated slot on the timetable. ELS lessons provide the foundational knowledge and skills required for children to read and write independently through play and to access our Literacy curriculum.

Children’s growing Phonics knowledge supports them in all areas of the curriculum and throughout each day they have many opportunities to practise their reading. This includes reading 1:1 with a member of staff, with a partner during paired reading and as a class.

Children continue daily Phonics lessons in Year 1 and further through the school to ensure all children become confident, fluent readers.

We follow the ELS progression and sequence. This allows our children to practise their existing phonic knowledge whilst building their understanding of the ‘code’ of our language GPCs (Grapheme Phoneme Correspondence). As a result, our children can tackle any unfamiliar words that they might discover.

Children experience the joy of books and language whilst rapidly acquiring the skills they need to become fluent independent readers and writers. ELS teaches relevant, useful and ambitious vocabulary to support each child’s journey to becoming fluent and independent readers.

We begin by teaching the single letter sounds before moving to diagraphs ‘sh’ (two letters spelling one sound), trigraphs ‘igh’ (three letters spelling one sound) and quadgraphs ‘eigh’ (four letters spelling one sound).

We teach children to:

• Decode (read) by identifying each sound within a word and blending them together to read fluently

• Encode (write) by segmenting each sound to write words accurately.

The structure of ELS lessons allows children to know what is coming next, what they need to do, and how to achieve success. This makes it easier for children to learn the GPCs we are teaching (the alphabetic code) and how to apply this when reading.

ELS is designed on the principle that children should ‘keep up’ rather than ‘catch up’. Since interventions are delivered within the lesson by the teacher, any child who is struggling with the new knowledge can be immediately targeted with appropriate support. Where further support is required, 1:1 interventions are used where needed. These interventions are short, specific and effective.

Supporting Reading at Home:

Every child will receive a new book weekly that is entirely decodable. This means that they should be able to read these books as they already know the code contained within the book. Through these books, children are working to read with accuracy , automaticity and prosody.
Children will also receive a book that reflects the scheme’s progression, supporting children to rehearse the target GPCs and Harder to Read and Spell Words taught in their ELS lessons.
We want children to practise reading their book 4 times across the week working on these skills:

Decode – sounding out and blending to read the word.

Fluency – reading words with less obvious decoding.

Expression – using intonation and expression to bring the text to life

We must use pure sounds when we are pronouncing the sounds and supporting children in reading words (‘c’, not ‘cuh’). If we mispronounce these sounds, we will make reading harder for our children. Please watch the videos below for how to accurately pronounce these sounds.