Phonics

At Great Ouse we follow a phonics scheme called Letters and Sounds, more information can be found here.

Letters and Sounds is a phonics resource published by the Department for Education and Skills in 2007. It aims to build children's speaking and listening skills in their own right as well as to prepare children for learning to read by developing their phonic knowledge and skills. It sets out a detailed and systematic programme for teaching phonic skills for children starting by the age of five, with the aim of them becoming fluent readers by age seven.

There are six overlapping phases. The table below is a summary based on the Letters and Sounds guidance for Practitioners and Teachers. For more detailed information, visit the Letters and Sounds website.

Phase Phonic Knowledge and Skills

Phase One (Pre-School/Reception)

 Activities are divided into seven aspects, including environmental sounds, instrumental sounds, body sounds, rhythm and rhyme, alliteration, voice sounds and finally oral blending and segmenting.
Phase Two (Reception) up to 6 weeks Learning 19 letters of the alphabet and one sound for each. Blending sounds together to make words. Segmenting words into their separate sounds. Beginning to read simple captions.
Phase Three (Reception) up to 12 weeks The remaining 7 letters of the alphabet, one sound for each. Graphemes such as ch, oo, th representing the remaining phonemes not covered by single letters. Reading captions, sentences and questions. On completion of this phase, children will have learnt the "simple code", i.e. one grapheme for each phoneme in the English language.
Phase Four (Reception) 4 to 6 weeks No new grapheme-phoneme correspondences are taught in this phase. Children learn to blend and segment longer words with adjacent consonants, e.g. swim, clap, jump.
Phase Five (Throughout Year 1) Now we move on to the "complex code". Children learn more graphemes for the phonemes which they already know, plus different ways of pronouncing the graphemes they already know.
Phase Six (Throughout Year 2 and beyond) Working on spelling, including prefixes and suffixes, doubling and dropping letters etc.

Click here to watch a short clip of the 42 letter sounds.

Pre School
Awards
Prospectus
Calendar
Ofsted
Welcome to Great Ouse Primary Academy

Welcome and thank you for your interest in our school. Great Ouse Primary Academy is a school that thinks and dreams big for its pupils. Expectations are high for all who make up the Great Ouse Primary Academy community and these standards reflect the wonderful physical environment we have developed to enable children to flourish within and beyond the school walls. We are committed to developing learners who are resilient, learners who are focused and learners who are aspirational in their goals; learners well prepared to be successful citizens of the 21st century.

Great Ouse Primary Academy opened as a brand new primary academy in September 2017 and is a proud member of Sharnbrook Academy Federation (SAF). The school is a named feeder school for Lincroft Academy and Sharnbrook Academy. The school is a bright, modern and inspiring learning environment with up-to-date technology and vibrant teaching and learning spaces for our pupils and staff.

We believe that the school absolutely belongs to our community of children, staff, parents and carers. We urge you to actively support and be involved in the school. It is a wonderful opportunity for everyone to be part of something special.

“The function of education is to teach one to think intensively and to think critically. Intelligence plus character – that is the goal of true education.”
(Martin Luther King, Jr)

Paul Ives

Principal

Close