Phonics

Phonics is taught throughout our Trust using 'Floppy's Phonics' which is a systematic synthetic phonics teaching resource. This is taught in carefully planned and structured phonic lessons that take place daily throughout EYFS and KS1.

Floppy's Phonics is made up of 6 Levels. These are expected to be taught during the following years: Nursery, Reception, Year 1 and Year 2. 

Floppy Phonics by level

Level One – Activities are divided into 7 aspects including environmental sounds, instrumental sounds, body sounds, rhythm and rhyme, alliteration, voice sounds and finally children are introduced to oral blending and segmenting.

Level One Plus – Children learn 24 new sounds. They begin to blend sounds to make words and segment words into separate sounds. These are made up of a selection of single letter sounds and digraphs (two letters that make one sound e.g. /ck/)

Level Two – Children learn 12 further sounds. These are made up of a selection of single letter sounds and digraphs (two letters that make one sound e.g. /ch/)

Level Three – Children learn 14 further sounds. These are made up of a selection of digraphs (two letters that make one sound e.g. /ai/) and trigraphs (three letters that make one sound e.g. /ear/).

 Level Four – No new grapheme-phoneme correspondences (sounds) are taught in this phase. Children learn to blend and segment longer words with adjacent consonants, e.g. stop, spin, jump.

Level Five - Children learn more graphemes for the phonemes which they already know, plus different ways of pronouncing the graphemes they already know.

Level Five revision- Children continue to work on their spelling, including prefixes and suffixes, doubling and dropping letters

Throughout the levels the children are gradually taught ‘tricky’ or 'helpful' words, these are words that do not follow the phonic rules, e.g. was, people.

How can parents help at home?

• Teach your child nursery rhymes.
• Read to your child regularly, even once they become readers themselves.
• Ensure that you hear your child read regularly, ideally every day.
• Encourage them to use their phonics to decode unknown words.
• Encourage your child to sound out words as they write.

Phonics vocabulary

Phoneme – The smallest unit of sound. There are approximately 44 phonemes in English (depending on regional accents). Phonemes can be put together to make words.

Grapheme – A way of writing down a phoneme. Graphemes can be made up of 1 letter c, 2 letters sh, 3 letters igh.

Digraph – A grapheme containing two letters that makes one sound (phoneme) eg, ay, ea, ch.

Trigraph - A grapheme containing three letters that makes one sound (phoneme) eg, igh, ear, air.

Blending (reading) – merging the phonemes to make a word.

Segmenting (writing) – Splitting the word into phonemes.

Tricky/Helpful words – Words that cannot be blended or segmented. They need to be learnt by sight.

How to pronounce pure sounds

//www.youtube.com/embed/UCI2mu7URBc#t=0.5

   How to blend to sounds words to read

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 Year 1 Phonics Screening Check

In the Year 1 Phonics Screening Check, children read a mixture of real words and alien words. In total, children read 40 words: 20 real words and 20 alien words. The screening check usually takes place during a short one-to-one session with the class teacher and is designed to be a calm and supportive experience for the children. Children which did not pass in 2025, will retake the test this year. In 2026, the Phonics Screening Check will take place during the week beginning Monday 8 June. Please do speak to your child’s class teacher if you have more questions about the check.  

Example of each phonic sounds

To hear how each sound should be pronounced, simply scan the QR code below or click here.This will take you to short examples so you can practise the sounds together at home. 

Please click HERE for more information on our Phonics Approach.