At Our Lady of Lourdes we use Jolly Phonics as our main phonics scheme.

This is a fun and child-centred approach to teaching reading through systematic synthetic phonics. The 42 letter sounds have actions, rhymes and stories that help to motivate the children to learn them.

Letter Sound Order

The letter sounds are split into 7 groups and taught in this order: 

By doing this the children can start to build words as early as possible (sat, pin, tap, pot etc).

How does Jolly Phonics work?

Using a synthetic phonics approach, Jolly Phonics teaches children the five key skills for reading and writing. The programme continues through school enabling the teaching of essential grammar, spelling and punctuation skills.

The 5 main skills are:

Learning the letter sounds

Children are taught the 42 main letter sounds. This includes alphabet sounds as well as digraphs such as sh, th, ai and ue.

Learning letter formation

Using multi-sensory methods, children learn how to form and write the letters.

Blending

Children are taught how to blend the sounds together to read and write new words.

Identifying the sounds in words (segmenting)

Listening for the sounds in words gives children the best start for improving spelling. 

Tricky words

Tricky words have irregular spellings and children learn these separately.