Highcliffe St Mark Primary School A Church of England Foundation School
Phonics
Highcliffe St Mark Primary School
Phonics Vision Statement
At Highcliffe St Mark Primary School, we prioritise a systematic approach to phonics that builds the fluency and confidence children need to master reading and spelling across the curriculum. By developing strong decoding skills, we empower our pupils to become independent, enthusiastic readers who use literacy as a vital tool for learning and imagination.
Follow the link below that outlines the progression in phonics knowledge from Foundation through to Year 2.
Phonics progression document -Anima Phonics
Anima Phonics
In Foundation, Year 1 and Year 2, children learn phonics through a program called Anima Phonics, which helps them learn their sounds. The program uses pictures, songs and actions for each sound to support learning. There are some great resources that you can access from home on the Anima Phonics website.
At the bottom of this page, you will find two sound maps that the children use at school to support them when learning Phase 2 and 3 sounds, as well as Phase 5 and 6 sounds.
Glossary of phonics terms
Toy talk is when you say each sound in a word separately like a robot might i.e. h - o - p . The children are encouraged to blend the word together to find out what the word is and, in this case, show they understand by doing the action!
Phonemes are the sounds that letters make. I.e. the letter s makes the sound sss
Graphemes are the way in which the phoneme is represented i.e. the written letter
Segmenting is when you sound out a word by reading the graphemes i.e. m-u-d
Blending is when you put the sounds back together to read the word i.e. m-u-d = mud
Rainbow words (common exception words) are words which contain 'silly sounds' where usual spelling rules don't apply when sounded out. E.g. the, to, me
Digraphs are two letters that make one sound i.e. sh and ar in sh-ar-k
Trigraphs are three letters that make one sound i.e. igh in n-igh-t
Useful websites and Apps