A decodable reading program teaches children systematic phonics in a sequential progression as they begin their journey in learning to read. Every child that learns to read in this way can build in confidence and reading success right from the start.
WAB Elementary School has adopted the Letters and Sounds Scope and Sequence. We have purchaed three different decodable programs that follows this systematic phonics progression. All of the decodables are strictly controlled with 100% decodable text. The fiction and nonfiction stories include vibrant illustrations and meaningful stories.
Sounds to Letters is a phonics framework published by the Department for Education in England. It aims to improve children's speaking and listening skills as well as to prepare children for learning to read by developing their phonic knowledge and skills. It is a detailed and systematic program for teaching phonic skills for children.
Phase 1 of Letters and Sounds concentrates on developing students' speaking and listening skills and lays the foundations for the phonics work. Through Phase 1, it is the aim that students grow in confidence with recognising everyday sounds and orally blending words. Overall, Phase 1 phonics aims to encourage students to:
Phase 1 is divided into seven aspects and each aspect has three strands:
Phase 2 builds on these existing skills that the students now possess. Students focus on listening to the sounds around them and also begin building on their segmenting and blending skills in letters and sounds. Phase 2 phonics aims to encourage students to:
Students learn the first 19 letter/sounds:
s /s/, a /a/, t /t/, p /p/, i /i/, n /n/, m /m/, d /d/, g /g/, o /o/, c /k/, k /k/, ck /k/, e /e/, u /u/, r /r/, h /h/, b /b/, f /f/, ff /f/, l /l/ ll /l/, ss /s/
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Phase 3 teaches and supports students in
By the time students reach Phase 3 of the program, students will already be able to blend and segment words containing the 19 letters taught in Phase 2. In Phase 3, 25 new graphemes are introduced one at a time.
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By Phase 4, students are able to blend sounds confidently to work out new words. They are able to sight read some VC (vowel-consonant) words right away without sounding them out. Students are also able to write each letter. By the end of Phase 4, every student should be able to
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Phase 5 phonics introduces a new set of graphemes and phonemes for reading and writing, as well as adding some suffixes at the end of words. Alternative pronunciations for graphemes are introduced too, such as 'ea' in 'pea,' 'read' and 'break'. Phase 5 phonics is essential because it's common in the English language. At this stage, students will learn:
During Phase 5, the following tricky words (which can’t yet be decoded) are introduced: oh, their, people, Mr, Mrs, looked, called, asked and could
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By Phase 6, students have already gained a lot of confidence and skills and have learned the most frequently occurring grahemem-phoneme correspondences in the English language. Now, they will develop their fluency as a reader and increase their accuracy when spelling. Students will be able to sight-read a large number of words. When coming across an unfamiliar word, they have a range of strategies to decode them including their sounding and blending skills. At this stage, students should be able to spell words phonemically although not always correctly.
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The keys to supporting students to become confident spellers lie in teaching the strategies, rules, and conventions systematically and explicitly. As students get older, the focus shifts from phonics to spelling and word study. Once most of the letter/sound sequences are mastered, it's important to move students into practicing and applying spelling rules and strategies to assess their own spelling.
