Planning Phonics & Spelling at Key Stage 2

Main assessment

Unaided writing analysis: - Nursery rhyme or short poem (learn orally

first) - Any unaided writing. Spend a staff meeting looking through for

evidence that they are applying skills from each phase.

Decide which phase each child is working at Moderate Reflect on where the children in your class are

Unaided writing assessment

Example of unaided writing – highlight.

Look at the phases that

children are working at

Find the 60% mark

Further assessment information

Decoding skills (for reading)Alien decoding assessment.Are children recognising digraphs as one

sound or are they attempting to blend individual letters?

You don’t need to do this as a formal assessment on all children – but it can be illuminating.

Further assessment info

Oral blending and segmenting assessments

If you are undecided which phase a child is on, this may help.

There is no need to do this as a formal assessment on everybody. However, it isn’t just the most struggling readers/spellers who may find these skills tricky. Use informal in class assessments too.

Oral blending assessment

Oral segmentation assessment

Further assessment info

GPC assessment

If children are working at the level of some of the lower phases, this will let you know which GPCs they already know and which they need to be taught.

Further assessment info

• Do they know all the letters of the alphabet?

Don’t assume anything.

Look at the phases that

children are working at

Find the 60% mark

Whole class teaching

Pitch at the 60% mark. If this is phase 1-5, then teach the whole class

15 mins per day focussed phonics teaching – See Letters and Sounds

If this is phase 6 or beyond you can probably move onto KS2 learning intentions but it is still important to include lots of phonics revision.

Build differentiation into your planning to support children above and below the 60% mark.

Intervention

Children working on a phase (1-5) below the level of whole class teaching must have intervention.

15 mins per day phonics teaching at the appropriate phase – see Letters and Sounds.

This has whole school implications for timetabling, TAs etc.

Planning resources

Letters and soundsYear 2/3 planning exemplification and

spelling programmeSpelling bankKS3 literacy progress unit (phonics)KS3 literacy progress unit (spelling)Y3 literacy support programme

What to teach when?

There is no official document to tell you this at the moment – Coming soonish.

Y3 can refer to Y2/3 Spelling Programme – but it isn’t quite up to date.

KS2 Phonics and Spelling is an attempt to fill this gap.

KS 2 Phonics and Spelling

Learning objectives taken mainly from Y2/3 Spelling Programme and Spelling Bank.

Some things adapted in the light of the Rose Report.

Lots of phonics revision thrown in.

Spelling conventions looked at from a phonics point of view.

Subject knowledge and teaching ideas drawn together from a wide range of documents.

Suggested approach

5 session spelling (from Y2/3 Spelling Programme)

Spelling conventions

HFW / cross curricular / phonics revision

KS2 Phonics and Spelling KS2 Phonics & Spelling

Things to think about

Applying across the curriculum

Identify words that match the phoneme/convention being worked on

Find opportunities to embed these words in reading and writing during the week

If different children are working on different words – you need to embed them all.

THIS IS TRICKY – IT NEEDS TIME AND THOUGHT DURING PLANNING

FAST TRACK INTRODUCTION

Children who are very unfamiliar with phonics need to have a fast track introduction to the skills and vocabulary involved.

FAST TRACK INTRODUCTION

Phase 1/2 – Loads of oral blending and segmenting games.

Phase 3 – Teach what phonemes, graphemes, digraphs, trigraphs are.

Learn to blend for reading and segment for writing

Phase 4 – Practise blending and segmenting adjacent consonants

FAST TRACK INTRODUCTION

Phase 5 – Become familiar with the term long vowel phoneme. Introduce the idea that graphemes can represent more than one phoneme and that phonemes can be represented by more than one grapheme.

Phase 6 – Recognise that whole words are rarely tricky, they just have ‘tricky bits’. Develop strategies for identifying tricky bits.

In reading, reliably recognise digraphs and trigraphs instead of reading individual letters.