Phonics at ARPS

Reading is a foundational life skill and a source of pleasure and wonder. It provides access to information, generates imagination, builds knowledge, enables creativity and shapes opinions. 

The essential elements of reading are the ‘Big 6’ (Konza, 2014):

• Oral language – knowing and using spoken words to express knowledge, ideas and emotions.

• Phonemic awareness –which is the knowledge of sounds (phonemes). 

• Phonics – knowing the sound (phoneme) and letter (grapheme) relationships.

• Fluency – reading accurately and at an appropriate rate with expression. 

• Vocabulary – understanding words in isolation and in context. 

• Comprehension – making meaning from text which includes developing knowledge of grammar.

These are the foundational skills that are all necessary to enable students to independently read and respond to increasingly complex fiction and non-fiction texts. 

At ARPS all students in Foundation to Year 2 participate in a minimum of daily explicit teaching of phonemic awareness and phonics using a scope and sequence based on the Decodable Readers Australia program. Students in Years 3-6 who require extra support with their reading  skills also receive explicit phonics instruction. Many staff at ARPS are trained in SoundsWrite - an explicit, systematic approach to teaching phonics.

Students learn to pronounce single letters and sounds and then blend them to form words. It also involves teaching students to segment sounds and spell words to make the link between reading and writing. Decodable texts are used to practice the letter-sound combinations that students have been taught. This builds students’ skills so they develop automaticity and so can read words quickly and accurately.

Tawny Harkness

Assistant Principal – Teaching and Learning