At St Cleopas CofE Primary School all infant children take part in high quality, daily phonics sessions. These are fun sessions involving lots of speaking, listening and games where the emphasis is on children’s participation. They learn to use their phonic knowledge for reading, writing and independent play.
From a very early stage, children develop an awareness of different sounds in spoken language. They develop an understanding that spoken words are made up of different sounds (phonemes) and they learn to match these phonemes to letters (graphemes). Phonics is about children knowing how letters link to sounds (graphemes to phonemes), e.g. c as in ‘cat’, ll as in ‘fell’, ee as in ‘sheep’.