From their first day in Foundation Stage at River Primary School, children are taught systematic synthetic phonics. Discrete phonics lessons are taught daily across all classes in Key Stage One.

In recognition of the importance of phonics teaching, opportunities to consolidate and build on the discrete learning in these lessons are identified and used by class teachers throughout the day and across all curriculum areas. This teaching is also supported within daily whole class guided reading sessions, the structure of which, will include an aspect of children applying decoding skills in order to develop fluency.  The timetable for each class in Foundation Stage and Key Stage 1 will include daily opportunities to share a story and read a poem, whilst also providing opportunities for children to sing songs and nursery rhymes. Teacher modelling is used to scaffold learning using the ‘my go – our go – your go’ model used for grapheme recognition, segmenting and blending.

Phonological awareness is the ability to reflect upon and manipulate the sounds structures of language through word, syllable and phonemes. When beginning in Foundation Stage, the importance of developing children’s phonemic awareness is recognised as a secure foundation for learning grapheme - phoneme correspondences.