At Stoke Park Infant School we have chosen to follow Bug Club Phonics, a comprehensive teaching programme and DFE approved systematic synthetic phonics phonics scheme. The scheme follows a proven progression in order to teach children to read and prepare them for the Year 1 phonics screening. Not only has Bug Club been found to be successful academically for children but it also creates a positive start to the reading journey with high quality teaching resources and books.

The Bug Club phonics programme follows the teaching sequence of Letters and Sounds. All lessons are structured in the same way each day, with an introduction, revisit, teach, practise and apply element. This provides children with consistent routines that they become familiar with. The resources are multisensory in that there are visual elements, auditory elements and kinesthetic elements. In essence the children have to look, listen and do. This means that lessons are fun, interactive and engaging and help to secure essential phonic knowledge.

Daily lessons include words taught in the previous day's session. The children quickly move onto reading captions and sentences and then decodable reading books. We use whole class teaching as advocated by Bug Club. Some children may then be identified as needing additional support within these sessions. They may also need additional support alongside these sessions. Some children require extensive support to catch-up and they are taught in smaller groups or on a one to one basis to target their specific needs.

Reading books are matched to the child's phonics stage or the sounds taught that week. Books are allocated for the child to then re-read at home and can bee accessed via each child's individual Bug Club log in. See the links below to help with finding the books allocated by your child's class teacher.

Phonics Assessment

We continually assess the children's phonic knowledge and skills. This may within the daily phonics lesson to ascertain who needs further support the following day or a half termly Bug Club assessment to check which digraphs they have retained and whether they can blend them to read real and alien words. All assessment inform our teaching and the next steps for each child. Some children may need further support in small groups or on a 1 to 1 basis or support within the lesson. We also send home phonic mats to all children in all year groups so they can practise their digraph and trigraph recognition at home.

Phonics Screening

Every year 1 child will complete a phonics screening check in the summer term. There are 40 words that the children are required to read, some are real words and some are alien/nonsense words. We complete the phonics screening check with all year 1 children every half term to ensure they are on track to pass in the actual screening check in the summer. The results are reported to parents and the local authority. Those children that do not pass the phonics screening in year 1 will receive further targeted intervention and support in year two and will re-sit the phonics screening again at the end of year two.