Jolly Phonics at New Road Primary School

Jolly Phonics is a fun, structured, and multi-sensory approach to teaching children how to read and write using phonics. It focuses on helping learners understand how sounds (phonemes) connect to letters (graphemes) so they can decode words when reading and encode (spell) them when writing. 

Phonic Sessions

At New Road Primary School, we run daily phonic sessions within our Reception and Key Stage one classes as well as intervention session to support pupils progress in reading and writing.

We continue phonic sessions in Key Stage 2 with pupil who continue to need support with their reading skills focusing on their word reading development. 

Staff are given a mantra and routines to follow for their phonic lessons. This ensure consistency between the phonic sessions throughout the school.

Supporting Pupils at home

In Reception, the pupils take home sound books, which have the learnt phonemes stuck in.  The pupils can practise the actions and phonemes at home using these books, as well as accessing the jolly phonic songs, via the QR code, at the front of their sound books.

Once the pupils are confident with orally blending and segmenting and know the first few groups of phonemes the pupils take home word boxes.  These boxes provide practise of reading simple words before having to apply these skills to sentences within books.

We feel these activities help develop pupils’ confidence in reading so they are then more keen and successful when they receive books with sentences.

These word boxes are continued with pupils in Key Stage One, if they require this early practise of reading.

We run workshops for parents to aid them with the knowledge and skills to support their child’s reading at home.  These sessions are shared on the website to inform parents who are unable to attend.