Phonics Vision Statement

Intent

At Stoke Park Junior School we aim for all children to develop their phonetic and word reading skills to become competent speakers, readers and spellers. As a junior school, we embed the use of a progressive synthetic phonics scheme called Bug Club which builds and consolidates the skills the children learn from Stoke Park Infant School. In the infant school, children progress through Phase 1 and 2 at the beginning of Year R to Phase 6 by the end of Year 2.

When the children join us in September, we screen pupils who did not pass their KS1 screening test and identify pupils who need to continue their phonic journey. We use familiar materials to help build their confidence and ability to identify GPCs (grapheme-phoneme-correspondences) and blend to read in order to build reading fluency.

Implementation

At Stoke Park Junior we adopt a multi-sensory approach to phonics that is taught in small groups and follows the structure of revise, teach, practise and apply. Teachers deliver high quality phonics to support the teaching and learning of sounds which is supplemented by additional Wave 3 interventions by a skilled and experienced LSA team. 

Teachers follow the Bug Club progression document that breaks down the progression of phonic sounds to teach that using baseline assessments and tracking documents, teachers then assign a ‘learn to read’ phonically decodable book matched to the child’s known and taught sounds. As the children become more confident and competent in their knowledge of phonemes and reading fluency improves, our phonic approach changes from using phonics to read but using phonics to spell.

Impact

The impact of using Bug Club phonics is to ensure that every child becomes a reader and they develop fluency and stamina to be able to read increasingly complex texts. We want all children to succeed and ensure that they read a wide range of genres that inspire and engage their imaginations to grow a true love of reading.