Phonics- ELS

Intent Statement

At St Cuthbert's, as part of a broad and balanced curriculum, phonics runs alongside other teaching methods to help children develop vital reading and writing knowledge and skills and give them a real love of literacy to enable pupils to reach their full potential and succeed in life

Early reading skills are taught by delivering our chosen validated Systematic Sythenic Phonics (SSP), Essential Letters & Sounds (ELS), which fulfils the National Curriculum requirements. ELS provides pupils with a multi-sensory approach that accommodates all learning styles and meets the needs of all our pupils. 

We believe that phonics is the first strategy that children should be taught in helping them learn to read and become independent writers. The teaching of phonics is delivered using coherently planned and sequenced lessons to allow for sufficient progression. As reading and writing are both important keys to learning, we teach phonics clearly and systematically in highly structured and ambitious daily lessons, learning the initial sounds first before progressing to exploring all of the different ways that sounds can be made in the English language!

The children are taught as a whole class, but may receive additional intervention to enable some pupils to 'Keep up rather than catch up'.  In some cases, the scheme is adapted to meet the needs of individual pupils. The phonemes (sounds) are systematically taught before the children are shown how to blend them for reading and segment them for writing. Alongside this, the children are taught to read and spell 'harder and read and spell words (HRSW)'.

Systematic Synthetic Phonics (SSP) Scheme - Essential Letters & Sounds

Essential Letters and Sounds (ELS) is our chosen Phonics programme. The aim of ELS is ‘Getting all children to read well, quickly’. It teaches children to read by identifying the phonemes (the smallest unit of sound) and graphemes (the written version of the sound) within words and using these to read words.

Children begin learning Phonics at the very beginning of Reception and it is explicitly taught every day during a dedicated slot on the timetable. Children are given the knowledge and the skills to then apply this independently. In addition, children who attend our Nursery are taught a sound a week (Spring & Summer terms prior to joining Reception) .

Throughout the day, children will use their growing Phonics knowledge to support them in other areas of the curriculum and will have many opportunities to practise their reading. This includes reading 1:1 with a member of staff, with a partner during paired reading and as a class. 

Children continue daily Phonics lessons in Year 1 and further through the school to ensure all children become confident, fluent readers.

We follow the ELS progression and sequence. This allows our children to practise their existing phonic knowledge whilst building their understanding of the ‘Code’ of our language GPCs (Grapheme Phoneme Correspondence). As a result, our children can tackle any unfamiliar words that they might discover. 

Children experience the joy of books and language whilst rapidly acquiring the skills they need to become fluent independent readers and writers. ELS teaches relevant, useful and ambitious vocabulary to support each child’s journey to becoming fluent and independent readers.

We begin by teaching the single letter sounds before moving to diagraphs ‘sh’ (two letters spelling one sound), trigraphs ‘igh’ (three letters spelling one sound) and quadgraphs ‘eigh’ (four letters spelling one sound).

We teach children to:

• Decode (read) by identifying each sound within a word and blending them together to read fluently
• Encode (write) by segmenting each sound to write words accurately.
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The structure of ELS lessons allows children to know what is coming next, what they need to do, and how to achieve success. This makes it easier for children to learn the GPCs we are teaching (the alphabetic code) and how to apply this when reading.

ELS is designed on the principle that children should ‘keep up’ rather than ‘catch up’. Since interventions are delivered within the lesson by the teacher, any child who is struggling with the new knowledge can be immediately targeted with appropriate support. Where further support is required, 1:1 interventions are used where needed. These interventions are short, specific and effective.