What is Phonics?

Phonics or synthetic phonics is a method of learning to read that is taught from the beginning of Early Years. Your child will be taught two crucial things when they are learning to read using synthetic phonics:

1. How sounds are represented by written letters. For example, they will be taught that the letter m represents an ‘mmmm’ sound.
2. How sounds can be blended together to make words.  For example, they will be taught that the sounds of the letters ‘c-a-t’ blend together to make the word cat.

Which phonics program do we follow at Field Lane?

At Field Lane we follow ‘Floppy’s Phonics’, which is a rigorous, easy to use systematic synthetic teaching programme for early reading and writing success. Its characters are from the Oxford Reading Tree and include Biff, Chip, Kipper, their friends and family and of course Floppy the dog.

We teach daily interactive phonics lessons which include multi-skills activities built around developing grapheme-phoneme correspondences, blending, decoding and encoding, comprehension, vocabulary, letter formation and pronunciation. Lessons are taught to the whole class or groups. Alongside our daily phonics lessons children read Floppy’s Sounds Books, Decodable Books, Fiction and Non-Fiction Books.