Phonics
At Buckingham Primary School, we believe that all our children can become fluent readers and writers. To support this, we have chosen to use Time for Phonics as our systematic synthetic phonics scheme. Useful guidance can be found here:
The term ‘synthetic’ is used to refer to the way that we combine the sounds to make a whole word. For example, by blending the individual phonemes, s-a-t makes the word ‘sat’.
When teaching synthetic phonics, the words are split up into the smallest possible sounds (phonemes). Phonemes are represented by letters (graphemes). These can be a single letter, e.g. ‘s’, two letters (a digraph) as in ‘ch’, or even three letters (a trigraph) like ‘igh’.
English is a tricky language because it contains 26 letters but 44 different phonemes (individual sounds). Synthetic phonics teaches all the phonemes and the different ways they can be represented using graphemes. This enables children to read and write (though of course there are words that cannot be read by blending their individual phonemes – these are known as tricky words or common exception words).
At Buckingham Primary School, we value reading as a crucial life skill. By the time children leave us, they read confidently for meaning and regularly enjoy reading for pleasure. Our readers are equipped with the tools to tackle unfamiliar vocabulary and we encourage our children to see themselves as readers for both pleasure and purpose.
