Early Reading and Phonics

At St Mary’s, we teach early reading through Red Rose Letters and Sounds, a systematic synthetic phonics programme developed by the Primary English and Literacy Team at Lancashire Professional Development Service.

Our aim is for every child to develop the phonic knowledge and reading fluency needed to become an enthusiastic, confident and successful reader and writer.

How Phonics Is Taught

Children begin their structured phonics journey when they enter Reception. Teaching follows a clearly sequenced progression through Phases 2–5:

• Reception: children progress through Phases 2, 3 and 4.
• Year 1: children revisit Phase 4 before progressing through Phase 5.
• Year 2 and beyond: children apply their phonic knowledge increasingly independently within reading and spelling. Further phonics teaching and support continue for any child who needs it.

Phonics is taught every day through focused, interactive lessons. Each lesson follows the familiar sequence:

Revisit and review → Teach → Practise → Apply

Children are explicitly taught the relationships between letters and sounds, known as grapheme-phoneme correspondences. They learn to:

• recognise and pronounce sounds accurately;
• blend sounds from left to right to read words;
• segment spoken words into sounds for spelling;
• read and spell carefully sequenced tricky and high-frequency words;
• apply their learning when reading and writing words, sentences and texts; and
• develop increasingly accurate and fluent reading.

Regular consolidation, oral work, dictation and opportunities to apply phonics in meaningful reading and writing help children remember what they have learned.

Reading Books

Children’s reading books are fully decodable and carefully matched to the Red Rose progression and the sounds they have already been taught. This enables children to practise successfully, develop fluency and experience the satisfaction of reading independently.

Books containing untaught sound patterns are not used for children’s independent decoding practice. Alongside these carefully matched books, children enjoy a much broader range of stories, poetry and non-fiction through class reading, shared reading and books read aloud by adults.

This ensures that learning to decode never limits children’s access to rich vocabulary, wonderful stories and ambitious ideas.

Assessment and Additional Support

Teachers assess children’s phonics continually through daily lessons, reading and writing. The Red Rose assessment and progression materials are used to check children’s:

• recognition of sounds and graphemes;
• oral blending and segmenting;
• blending for reading;
• segmenting for spelling and writing;
• recognition of tricky words; and
• ability to apply their learning independently.

Assessment enables teachers to identify precisely what each child knows and where additional practice is needed.

Children who are at risk of falling behind receive prompt, focused support using the same Red Rose approach and language as their whole-class teaching. This helps them address specific gaps and keep up with the programme, rather than being introduced to a different method.

Where appropriate, additional Red Rose catch-up materials may be used to support older pupils who still need to secure aspects of phonics.

Consistency and Training

All adults involved in teaching phonics use the Red Rose sequence, terminology, routines and resources consistently. Staff training, monitoring and ongoing professional development help us maintain high-quality teaching and fidelity to the programme throughout school.

You can learn more about the programme on the Lancashire Red Rose Letters and Sounds website.

How Families Can Help with Phonics

Families can support early reading by:

• listening to their child read regularly;
• encouraging them to say each sound and blend through the whole word;
• using pure sounds—for example, saying “m” rather than “muh”;
• revisiting the sounds and tricky words sent home;
• praising effort, careful blending and successful self-correction;
• rereading familiar books to develop fluency and expression; and
• continuing to read more challenging stories aloud for enjoyment.

If a child is unsure of a word, encourage them to look carefully at the letters, say the sounds and blend them together. The language used at home should support the approach taught in school.