Crestwood Park Primary School

Phonics is how we teach children to read and write. At Crestwood Park, we teach phonics using the DfE validated scheme 'Supersonic Phonic Friends'.

We use this scheme because it is comprehensive and covers all year groups from nursery through to year 2 and beyond. This scheme features 11 characters to represent the skills involved in learning to read. This brings the process alive for our children and gives them some friendly faces to join them on their reading journey. There are also alliterative rhymes and actions to accompany each sound to help children to know and remember more. Supersonic Phonic Friends wraps children in rhyme, which will be a huge benefit to our pupils. 

We love the strong home learning links that Supersonic Phonics Friends promotes. With parent workshops, activities and weekly newsletters, we know that we will be able to get parents as involved as possible in their children's learning in phonics. 

This scheme teaches phonics in 6 phases:

1. Firm Foundations- This is taught in Nursery and provides children with the listening skills that they need to hear the sounds in words.

2. The Basics 2- The Basics 2 teaches children their first letter sound correspondences. This is where children learn the sounds that individual letters make e.g. that the letter s makes the first sound in snake. This is also where children start to learn some tricky words. This phase is taught in Reception. 

3. The Basics 3- The Basics 3 teaches children digraphs. This is where two letters make one sound e.g. ai in rain or oa in boat. Children will learn more tricky words. This phase will also be taught in Reception, usually in the spring term. 

4. The Basics 4- This teaches children to read and write words with adjacent consonants e.g. sand, tree, stink. This phase may begin in the summer term of Reception but is most likely to be taught in the autumn term of year 1.

5. Choose to Use spellings- This teaches children alternative ways to spell the sounds they already know e.g. ai as in rain and ay as in spray, oa as in boat and oe as in toe. This phase is taught in autumn or spring term in year 1. Children will learn more tricky words.

Children in this phase will also learn Switch it Spell Sounds, where they learn that the same letter can represent different sounds e.g. the i in sixth and wild, the o in frog or in old.

6. Year 2 Spelling Rules & Appendices- In this phase year 2 will be taught different spelling rules for words that don't fit the patterns they have previously learnt e.g. words ending in 'il' like pencil, nostril, suffixes -ment, -ness, -ful, -less and -ly as in enjoyment, sadness, helpful, hopeless and badly. 

We assess children's phonic knowledge and abilities every day. This will be an informal assessment of how children have learnt to read and write a particular sound. 

We formally assess children's phonic knowledge once a term and phonics becomes a key topic in our pupil progress meetings.

Our reading books have been carefully sorted to match the sounds taught at each phase. This gives children the opportunity to practise reading sounds they have already learnt at school at home. It also means that children will never encounter a sound they have not been taught yet in their phonic reading book. 

We hope that children will read regularly at home with parents and will re-read books to build up their fluency. Ideally, children will read every day. 

Our team of phonics teachers are referred to as our phonics fairies. Meet our marvellous team!!