Supporting your child at home
FFT Success for All Phonics has produced a handy guide with tips and tricks to support your child with their phonics and reading at home. Click the link to find out more.
FFT Success for All - Tips for Parents
How to pronounce GPCs
Click the link to hear the proper pronunciation of the Grapheme-Phoneme Correspondences in the FFT Success for All Phonics.
At Beckingham Primary School, we believe that all our children can become fluent readers and writers. This is why we teach reading through FFT Success for All Phonics, which is a systematic and synthetic phonics programme. We start teaching phonics in Reception and follow the FFT Success for All progression plan, which ensures children build on their growing knowledge of the alphabetic code, mastering phonics to read and spell as they move through school.
As a result, all our children are able to tackle any unfamiliar words as they read. At BPS, we also model the application of the alphabetic code through phonics in shared reading and writing, both inside and outside of the phonics lesson and across the curriculum. We have a strong focus on language development for our children because we know that speaking and listening are crucial skills for reading and writing in all subjects.
Daily phonics lessons in Reception and Year 1
We teach phonics for 30 minutes a day. In Reception, we build from 10- 15 minute lessons, with additional daily oral blending games, to the full-length lesson as quickly as possible, to ensure children make good progress. Any child who needs additional practice has keep-up support, taught by a fully trained adult. Keep-up lessons match the structure of class teaching, and use the same procedures, resources and mantras, but in smaller steps with more repetition, so that every child secures their learning.
We timetable daily phonics lessons for any child in Year 2 or 3 who is not fully fluent at reading or has not passed the Phonics Screening Check. These children urgently need to catch up, so the gap between themselves and their peers does not widen. We use the FFT assessments to identify the gaps in their phonic knowledge and teach to these using the keep-up resources – at pace.
If any child in Years 3 to 6 has gaps in their phonic knowledge when reading or writing, we plan phonics intervention lessons to address specific reading/writing gaps. These short, sharp lessons last 10 minutes and take place at least three times a week