Letters and Sounds

Phase One

Gooseberry Green believes that getting children off to a good start is very important so practitioners take particular account on the following points related to Phase One. Phase One recognises the importance of developing speaking and listening skills as a priority in their own right paving the way to making a good start on reading and writing. The more words children know and understand before they start a systematic programme of phonic work the better equipped they are to succeed. Gooseberry Green provides a broad and rich language experience for children, which is good practice in the early years. Children enjoyably engage in worthwhile learning activities that encourage them to talk a lot, to increase their stock of words and improve their dialogue. Phase One paves the way for the systematic teaching of phonic work. In this phase the activities are included to develop oral blending and segmenting of the sounds of spoken words. These activities are very largely adult led which are embedded within a language rich educational programme that takes full account of children’s freely chosen activities and ability to learn through play.

Phase One activities are designed to underpin and run alongside activities in other phases.

Jolly Phonics At Gooseberry Green

We also use the Jolly Phonics programme. Children are taught through a synthetics phonics programme which is also used in some local schools. Jolly Phonics teaches the children the main 42 sounds of English, not just the alphabet sounds. They will be:

 learning the letter sounds

 letter formation

 blending - preparing for reading

 identifying the sounds in words – preparing for writing 

 tricky words – irregular words

All words are made up of 40+ sounds in English, but only 26 letters are used to represent these sounds. For reading and writing children need to be fluent in saying the sounds that go with the letters. Young children learn particularly quickly when there is activity involved. By doing an action for each letter sound, the children are using body movements, ears, eyes and speech, to help them remember. This multi-sensory approach is a very effective way of teaching, as well as being fun for the children.