Gildersome Primary School

ELS Phonics

How we teach Phonics

Essential Letters and Sounds (ELS) at Gildersome Primary School

At Gildersome Primary School, we use Essential Letters and Sounds (ELS) to teach early reading and phonics. ELS is a systematic synthetic phonics program that helps children quickly learn to read, write, and spell with confidence.

Our aim is for every child to become a fluent, confident reader who enjoys books and develops a lifelong love of reading. Through the ELS approach, children are taught to:

• Recognise individual sounds (phonemes) and match them to letters (graphemes)
• Blend sounds together to read new words
• Segment words into sounds to support accurate spelling
• Apply their phonics knowledge in reading and writing across the curriculum

Phonics is taught daily from the very start of Reception and continues through Key Stage 1. Each lesson follows a consistent, structured routine that helps children remember and apply what they have learned. We use high-quality, fully decodable books that are matched precisely to the sounds your child is learning. This ensures that children can practise their skills successfully and grow in confidence.

At home, you can support your child by sharing books regularly, practising the sounds they are learning, and celebrating their progress as they begin their reading journey. Please watch the videos below to ensure you are using the correct pronunciations and pure sounds.

Supporting Reading at Home:

• Children will only read books that are entirely decodable, this means that they should be able to read these books as they already know the code contained within the book.
• We only use pure sounds when decoding words (no ‘uh’ after the sound)
• We want children to practise reading their book 4 times across the week working on these skills:

                Decode – sounding out and blending to read the word.

                Fluency – reading words with less obvious decoding.

                Expression – using intonation and expression to bring the text to life!

We must use pure sounds when we are pronouncing the sounds and supporting children in reading words. If we mispronounce these sounds, we will make reading harder for our children. Please watch the videos below for how to accurately pronounce these sounds.

At the beginning of each academic year, we will hold an information session for parents and carers to find out more about what we do for Phonics, Reading and English at our schools. Please do join us.

More support for parents and carers can be found here:

https://home.oxfordowl.co.uk/reading/reading-schemes-oxford-levels/essential-letters-and-sounds/  

CORE AIM: GETTING CHILDREN TO READ, QUICKLY

Here are some of the terms we use when we teach phonics:

• phoneme- the smallest unit of sound in a word.
• grapheme – letter or a group of letters representing one sound, e.g. s, sh, ch, igh.
• digraph – two letters making one sound, e.g. sh, th, ph.
• split digraph – two letters, split, making one sound, e.g. a-eas in make or i-e in kite
• CVC: consonant vowel consonant e.g. cap.
• blend – to merge individual sounds together to pronounce a word, e.g. s-n-a-p, blended together, reads snap.
• segment- to split up a word into its individual phonemes in order to spell it, e.g. the word 'cat' has three phonemes: /c/, /a/, /t/.

For more information about Essential Letters and Sounds, you can visit the ELS website.

How could you help at home?

• Try to say the short sound of the letter, not the letter name. This will help children when they come to blend words together. E.g. the letter names dee-oh-gee don’t blend together to make ‘dog’. (Please see the videos below to support this.
• Read regularly with your child - Encourage children to recognise sounds and as they grow more confident, encourage them to blend the sounds together and to read sentences independently.
• Please record your child's reading in their reading record.
• When you are reading to your child, emphasise the rhyming words and ask what is special about them.
• Initial letter sound hunt – Say a sound to your child and see if they can find something in their house that starts with that letter. This also works well with ‘I spy’ but remember to use the letter sound and not its name.  
• Songs – Sing nursery rhymes and traditional songs with your child and talk to them about the patterns that they notice in the words.