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How do we teach phonics?

Teaching Phonics at Croft Primary School

Below are some details about how we teach phonics (one aspect of reading) Croft Primary School.

When teaching phonics we use a government produced scheme of work called Letters and Sounds. It aims to build children's speaking and listening skills in their own right as well as to prepare children for learning to read by developing their phonic knowledge and skills.


Letters and Sounds is broken down into 6 phases which are worked through from nursery to the end of year 2. 

Phase 1
Showing an awareness of rhyme and alliteration. Distinguishing between sounds in the environment and phonemes. Exploring and experimenting with sounds and words. Discriminating speech sounds in words. Beginning to orally blend and segment phonemes.

Phase 2

Blending for reading and segmenting for spelling simple cvc words.

Letter sets

Set 1 - s, a, t, p,

Set 2 - l, n, m, d,

Set 3 - g, o, c, k,

Set 4 - ck, e, u, r,

Set 5 - h, b, f, ff, l, ll, ss,

Phase 3

Knowing one grapheme for each of the 43 phonemes.

Letter sets:

Set 6 - j, v, w, x

Set 7 - y, z, zz, qu


ear, air, ure, er, ar, or, ur, ow, oi,

ai, ee, igh, oa, oo

Consonant digraphs:

ch, sh, th, ng.

Phase 4

This is a consolidation unit. There are no new graphemes to learn but the children learn how read longer words such as stamp, plug, flag, twig.

Phase 5



Alternative pronunciations for:

i, o, c, g, u, ow, ie, ea, er, a, y, ch, ou

Phase 6

At this stage children should be able to spell words phonemically although not always correctly. The main aim is of this phases is to become more fluent readers and more accurate spellers. 


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