Phonics

At St Mary's, we value reading as a key life skill and are dedicated to enabling our children to become lifelong readers with a love of books. We aim for every child to become a fluent reader by the end of Key Stage 1 so they can focus on developing their fluency, expression and comprehension as they move through Key Stage 2. To allow our children to develop a strong phonic awareness and effective blending and decoding skills, we use Essential Letters and Sounds (ELS) as our validated systematic synthetic phonics programme.
The video at the bottom of this page provides more information about how we teach children to read phonetically decodable books in Reception and Year 1. There are also useful documents below which you can use to support your child at home.