At St. Teresa’s RC Primary School, we are passionate about ensuring all children have the opportunities to become confident and enthusiastic readers and writers. We believe that phonics provides the foundations of learning to make the development into fluent reading and writing easier.

At St. Teresa’s, children are taught phonics using a systematic daily phonics programme. It maps out the order in which the individual speech sounds and the letter/s that represent them will be introduced and learned. These phonics lessons are structured so that they revisit what children have already learned as well as introducing new learning. This allows our phonics teaching and learning to be progressive from Nursery up to Year 2, as well as allowing children’s listening and speaking skills to develop.

This organised approach continues over time with children reading more and more words as new letters and their sounds are introduced. With practice, the skills of word recognition and blending become speedy and automatic and only used when needed. For example, even as expert readers we do call on our phonics skills and knowledge when we come across an unfamiliar word.

Our Phonics subject leader is Miss McCandless.

Primary English and Phonics National Curriculum

Whole School Overview