Teaching Primary Phonics

As a trainee or early career teacher, you’ll encounter a range of systematic synthetic phonics (SSP) programmes. To teach them effectively, it’s important to understand how your existing knowledge applies — and where you might need to build confidence.

This quick guide introduces four widely used phonics programmes in schools today. While there are many others, including locally developed schemes, these are the ones most commonly recommended by teacher training providers and trainees alike.

Explore the top phonics programmes and how to teach them with confidence, with these extracts from Teaching Systematic Synthetic Phonics in Primary Schools by Joliffe et al.

Read Write Inc.

This is a commercial systematic synthetic phonics programme, designed to be delivered on a daily basis.

The Five Key Principles of the Programme
Pace, Praise, Purpose, Participation, and Passion

The Read Write Inc. programme is organised into bands. Each band covers a set of phonemes, and pupils move to the next band once they have demonstrated that they can read, spell and confidently use the phonemes from the bands they have already been taught.

Pupils are assessed individually before beginning the programme using the 'Sound and Word Entry Assessment', which indicates the band they should begin studying. Pupils are then organised into groups so that they can be taught at a band appropriate to their needs. It is suggested that these groups should contain no more than 20 pupils. Pupils are then assessed again after 4 weeks to ensure they are making progress and are indeed in a band group that matches their phonic ability. These groups are not static and, as regular assessment takes place every 6 to 8 weeks, groupings are checked and altered to maintain rapid progress for all pupils. Records of attainment are kept to inform future planning and show individual pupil progression.

Jolly Phonics

Jolly Phonics is 'a fun and child-centred approach to teaching literacy' (Jolly Learning website). As with other programmes, this is designed to enable children to begin building words as early as possible. It focuses on 42 letter sounds and are split into seven groups:

s a t p i n
ck e h r m d
g o u 1 f b
ai j oa ie ee or
z w ng v oo
y x ch sh th
qu ou oi ue er ar

Jolly Phonics uses a synthetic phonics approach and identifies five key skills for reading and writing:

Learning the letter sounds: Children are taught 42 main letter sounds.
Learning letter formation: Children use multi-sensory methods to learn how to form and write the letters.
Blending: They blend the sounds together to read and write new words.
Identifying the sounds in words: They identify sounds in words to help with spelling.
Tricky words: Tricky words with irregular spellings are learned separately.

Letters and Sounds

Unlike Read Write Inc. and Jolly Phonics, Letters and Sounds is not a commercial programme. It was produced by the Primary National Strategy (DfES, 2007) and distributed widely at no cost.

Discrete teaching
Like other systematic synthetic phonics programmes, Letters and Sounds should be taught daily, in discrete sessions. This allows the teaching of phonics to become an important, high-profile part of the school day. It promotes clear focus on the teaching of phonics and gives teachers regular opportunities to deliver high-quality phonics teaching which is not overshadowed by other subject matter.

Like Read Write Inc. and Jolly Phonics, Letters and Sounds provides a clear structure for teaching the knowledge and skills that children need to be able to both read and spell using phonics.

Phonics Bug

Phonics Bug is written by Rhona Johnson and Joyce Watson and provides catch-up activities for children who learn more slowly, to follow on from these assessments. The programme provides books linked to teaching phases, all of which are available to read online as well as in print. Phonics Bug also has software for the interactive whiteboard as a key teaching method.

For more detailed information on these schemes and to develop the skills to effectively teach phonics in primary schools, go to Teaching Systematic Synthetic Phonics in Primary Schools.