Welcome to
Newton Farm Nursery, Infant & Junior School
Phonics
PHONICS
At Newton Farm, phonics is delivered through a systematic, fast-paced, and inclusive sequence using the Bug Club scheme designed to build confident readers and writers from Nursery through Year 1.
Our Phonics Principles
- Inclusive & Adaptive: Lessons adapt to ensure all pupils—including SEND and EAL learners—actively participate through multi-sensory resources, visual prompts, and practical exploration.
- Pure Sounds & Clear Modeling: Teachers explicitly model pure sounds, accurate articulation, and correct letter formation.
- Core Skills Integration: Every session balances blending for reading with segmenting for spelling.
- Immediate Support: In-lesson assessment quickly identifies misconceptions to deliver timely keep-up intervention.
5-Step Core Lesson Structure
- Review: Revisit known sounds, graphemes, and tricky words.
- Teach: Introduce a new sound, grapheme, or spelling pattern.
- Practise: Say, read, blend, segment, and sort words actively.
- Apply: Read decodable texts and complete sentence writing or dictation.
- Respond: Address errors immediately and plan targeted follow-up.
Curriculum Progression
Phase / Year Group | Focus | Key Strategies |
Nursery (Phase 1 & Early Phase 2) | Listening skills, sound awareness, rhythm, rhyme, oral blending, and initial GPCs. | Songs, games, sound walks, mnemonics, and playful mark-making in continuous provision. |
Reception | Systematic grapheme-phoneme correspondences (GPCs) for early reading and writing. | Consistent daily structure, decodable text reading, word building, and phoneme spotting. |
Year 1 | Phonics consolidation, alternative graphemes, fluency, and Phonics Screening Check preparation. | Real and pseudo-word reading, text application, dictation, and independent writing. |
Reading, Provision & Support
- Decodable Books: Pupils read Bug Club books directly matched to the specific phonics phases and sounds they have mastered.
- Continuous Provision: Early Years environments offer independent sound-sorting, matching games, and mark-making opportunities linked to taught sounds.
- Targeted Keep-Up: Children requiring extra help receive frequent, targeted small-group practice, paired learning, and multi-sensory support to maintain confidence and progress.
Early Years Foundation Stage
Key Stage One
Key Stage Two
Although no direct phonics sessions are taught, it is built into daily literacy lessons and spellings. Spelling patterns and families are used in order to encourage correct spelling. Good phonetic skills help children to segment and blend words when spelling, and to help when reading more complex words. Children who enter KS2 and have not met the required phonic standard will receive extra support to ensure they make rapid progress and catch up.
USEFUL LINKS:
Phonics Phase 2 Pronunciation
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DIpcahxNSU4
Phonics Phase 3 Pronunciation
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vU2vWZKS7rY&t=30s
Phonics Phase 5 Pronunciation (Alternative spellings)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R3S5sJw7MfI
100 High Frequency Words
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uoNGJHValg4
Other excellent videos for supporting children's learning in Phonics are 'Mr Thornes does Phonics', 'Alphablocks' and 'Nessy Reading Strategies', which can be accessed on Youtube.
Our curriculum for this subject is based on and Newton Farm Scheme using the "Bug club phonics" scheme of learning as a base. Parent workshops, information sessions and class newsletters provide extra information on how we teach phonics.