At Kids’ Academy we aim to keep the curriculum up to date and in line with the British Curriculum as much as possible, so with that in mind we follow the ‘Twinkl Phonics’ programme for teaching phonics, reading and writing.

 

As with other phonic programmes, ‘Twinkl Phonics’ encourages children to initially play with sounds and develop their ability to discriminate different sounds. Over time the children will develop an understanding that words are made up of different sounds (phonemes) and they will begin to hear the different sounds in words. Gradually they will begin to match sounds to letters (graphemes) and this will be the basis of their phonic knowledge which they will use in their reading and writing.  The main benefit of the ‘Twinkl Phonics’ programme is that children learn the sounds through a much richer range of multi-sensory resources, games and activities and they are given more opportunities to develop their understanding of how letters and sounds are used in words. 

 

Nursery children start the ‘Twinkl Phonics’ programme with the introduction of Level 1 phonics, and will learn about environmental sounds, instrumental sounds, sounds made using body percussion, voice sounds in songs, rhymes and stories. All these aspects are key to early phonics as without the ability to listen and discriminate between different sounds the children will struggle when listening to letter sounds and segmenting them for reading later on. This stage also includes lots of activities to encourage pre-writing skills, and the building of hand muscles and hand to eye co-ordination skills.

 

Foundation Stage 1 (FS1) children will continue to build upon all of the above and as they progress they will be introduced more formally to the ‘Twinkl Phonics’ programme through Levels 1 and 2. A range of fun activities are used to teach skills such as rhyming, alliteration and oral blending and segmenting in the final stages of Level 1 before moving on to Level 2 which sees the introduction of the first letter sets using a multisensory approach of mnemonics, actions and songs to aid learning.

 

Foundation Stage 2 (FS2) focuses on a review of Level 2 and teaching Levels 3 and 4. The children will continue to learn new sounds through a wide range of resources, games and activities, including interactive whiteboard software. By the end of Term 3 they will know 51 of the main sounds (phonemes and graphemes) used in the English Language and they will be using this knowledge in their reading and writing. They will also learn to sight read and write a range of common exception words that cannot be decoded using phonic knowledge.