At St Stephen's Primary School, we use the Essential Letters and Sounds (ELS) programme as our approach to teaching Phonics. The aim of ELS is 'Getting children to read well, quickly'. 

ELS is a synthetic Phonics programme which we use to help children to read throughout Reception and KS1. Our synthetic Phonics approach is a way of teaching children how sounds (phonemes and graphemes) are represented by written letters. We teach our children to read by blending these sounds together to make words. 

Children at St Stephen's Primary School begin learning to read through Phonics at the very beginning of Reception and it is explicitly taught every day. Throughout the rest of the day, children will have the opportunity to use and apply their growing Phonics knowledge within other areas of the curriculum, including the chance to read 1:1 with an adult, with a partner or in a group setting. Children continue daily Phonics lessons in Year 1 and 2 , and further through the school when necessary to ensure all children become fluent and confident readers. 

All staff are trained in the ELS Phonics programme, and are aware that we must use pure sounds when we are pronouncing and segmenting the sounds and words. If we mispronounce these sounds, we will make reading harder for our children. Please watch the videos below for guidance on how to accurately pronounce these sounds when helping your child(ren) with any Phonics at home:

If you would like any more information about ELS and the teaching of Phonics at our school, please have a look through the PowerPoint below. Hopefully this is able to answer any questions you may have.