Phonics & Reading

At Milford Infants' our vision is that children will become fluent, skilled and attentive readers with a genuine lifelong love of reading. Effective phonics teaching is the first step to achieving this.  We follow our own Phonics scheme which  has been devised from a combination of the DFE's Letters and Sounds and Jolly Phonics. Children are taught the 44 phonemes (sounds) and the core skills of segmenting and blending.  Our teaching is systematic and synthetic, which means we teach in an ordered sequence, from simple to more complex rules.

Our team of highly skilled teachers and teaching support staff  take part in regular in house training ensuring consistency and best practice is delivered.  Children’s progress is continually reviewed with individual phonics assessments taking place half termly.    If a child is identified as working below the expected level, additional support is given and parents are informed and advised how they can best help their child.  As repetition is a vital part of a child’s phonics learning, parents are encouraged to support their children in practising using resources provided.

When children are able to recognise graphemes (written representation of the sound) and confidently blend they are provided with books to take home.  These books are from a variety of publishers but are closely matched to the phonemes children have been taught in school.  This ensures that children can independently read all (or almost all) of the words, using the phonic rules they know and their blending skills.

We hold Phonics open mornings and  'Learn with your Child' sessions with a Reading focus every year to support parents in understanding how we teach early Reading and to enable them to support their children in the exciting process!

The National Phonics Screening Check is performed in June of Year 1. The purpose of the screening check is to confirm that all children have learned phonic decoding to an age appropriate standard. Children who do not meet the required standard for the check in Year 1 enter again in Year 2 and receive additional intervention support.

We also subscribe to Bug Club reading online for our Key Stage One children.

Please ask your child's teacher for log in details.

Click on the bug below to go to the log in page.