Taking Our Phonics Learning Further – Key Stage One
This week in Key Stage One, pupils have been taking their phonics learning further, reflecting our school values of Belong, Believe and Achieve and supporting progression within the Language and Literacy area of learning.
Through focused work in Phonics and Word Recognition, children explored different ways to represent the long ‘a’ sound, including ay, ai, a_e and a. Pupils learned and applied spelling rules, developing awareness of when and why each variation is used. They sorted ay and ai words before moving on to independent sentence writing, with pupils challenged to include more than one ‘ay’ sound variation within a single sentence.
We supported learning through active and multi‑sensory approaches, using magnetic sound squares to build and manipulate words. This helped pupils develop confidence, reinforce sound–symbol correspondence and engage positively with phonics learning.
To extend learning further, pupils applied their phonics knowledge in Reading, using our new decodable readers. Children read both fiction and non‑fiction texts, supporting fluency, accuracy and comprehension while strengthening their ability to apply phonics skills across the curriculum.
