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At Rothersthorpe CE Primary School we use 'Floppy Phonics' by Oxford Owl

We place great importance on teaching early reading and fully understand how this can help to unlock many opportunities across the whole of the curriculum for our children. We teach phonics following a scheme called 'Floppy Phonics'. This is a complete systematic synthetic phonics programme (SSP) which has been developed by schools for schools. It is based on the original Letters and Sounds programme, but it has been extensively revised to provide a complete teaching programme which meets all the expectations of the National Curriculum.

How is phonics taught at Rothersthorpe School?

Phonics is taught daily at Rothersthorpe. These sessions have a focus on decoding, prosody and fluency. Take a look at our programme progression map below, that highlights the order in which we teach GPC's and tricky words.

First, your child will be taught the most straightforward letters and the sounds they make. For example, they will be taught that the letter ‘m’ represents an mmm sound and the letters ‘oa’ represent an oh sound.

• In phonics we use the word grapheme to talk about the letters on the page and phoneme to talk about the sounds those letters represent.

Next, they will learn how sounds can be put together (blended) to make words. For example, they will learn that the sounds of the letters ‘m-a-t’ blend together to make the word ‘mat’. Your child will then learn more sounds and will start blending them too.

• It can take until Year 2/Primary 3 before your child might have learned all 44 sounds in English and the many different spellings used for each sound.

Then the children will really start to read! They will learn to recognise the different letters or pairs of letters (graphemes) in a word, say the separate sounds (phonemes) slowly, then put (blend) them together. For example, they will be taught that the word ‘boat’ can be separated out (segmented) into ‘b-oa-t’ which represents the sounds bbb-oh–ttt. They can blend these sounds into the word ‘boat’

• In phonics we use the word decode to talk about reading a single word. We use the word segment to talk about breaking a word down into separate sounds and blend to talk about putting the sounds together to make a word.

How can I help my child with their phonics learning?

We understand the importance of support at home to help your child on their phonics journey.

Here is a link to the Floppy Phonics, Oxford Owl site for parents where you will find more information on how to support your child, pronunciation videos to help ensure consistent modelling and information on how reading books will be given out weekly.

https://home.oxfordowl.co.uk/reading/phonics/

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