Here at Holly Hill, we follow Supersonic Phonic Friends. This is a phonics scheme aimed at meeting the needs of every child. Every lesson is fun and engaging. The lessons are enriched with movement, a fundamental pre-writing skill and each lesson maximises the learning connections. 

Supersonic Phonic Friends begins in Nursery with the Firm Foundations and develops progressively through to Year 2 until the Higher Levels of Phonics - Switch it Spell sounds are reached.

 

Firm Foundations

Firm Foundations in Phonics offers experience, exposure and enjoyment of sound awareness. This phase is purely about securing a strong sound processing system which is critical to enjoyment and success in children’s later reading and writing skills.

This includes:

- Rhythm and rhyme - Rhyming stories, rhyming bingo, clapping out the syllables in words and odd one out.

– Alliteration I-Spy type games and matching objects which begin with the same sound.

• Voice sounds Oral blending and segmenting. 

 

Basics 2

The Basics 2 teaches children at least one spelling for 18 of the 44 sounds of the English language. Children will use their auditory processing and memory skills from Firm Foundations in Phonics 1 to start to recognise the spellings for the sound with Sam, segment and build with Seb and Bill, read and blend with Rex and Ben and write with Ron. They will learn the early concepts of Choose to Use with Suze for a handful of multiple spellings for sounds.

At the end of The Basics 2,  children will be able to hear up to 3 sounds in words, recognise spellings and read and write simple CVC words with the 18 spellings for sounds. They will be able to read decodeable texts with The Basics 2 spellings and make phonetically plausible attempts in their emerging stages of spelling in their writing journey.

Sounds included in Basics 2:

s, a, t, p
i, n, m, d
g, o, c, k
ck, e, u, r
h, b, f, ff, l, ll, ss

 

Basics 3

The Basics 3 teaches children the spellings for the further 26 of the 44 sounds of the English language. Children will use their auditory processing and memory skills from Firm Foundations in Phonics 1 and their Basics 2 skills to continue to recognise the spellings for the sound with Sam, segment and build with Seb and Bill, read and blend with Rex and Ben and write with Ron. They will continue to learn the early concepts of Choose to Use with Suze for some further multiple spellings for sounds and an introduction to Switch it with Mitch for alternative pronunciations of spellings for sounds. Children will learn their tricky words with Tess and read nonsense words with Nan.

Sounds included in Basics 3:

j, v, w, x

y, z, zz, qu

Consonant digraphs: ch, sh, th, ng

Vowel digraphs: ai, ee, igh, oa, oo, ar, or, ur, ow, oi, ear, air, ure, er

 

Basics 4

The Basics 4 teaches children to be able to hear more than 3 sounds in a word. They will continue to embed their mastery of The Basics 1 and 2 spellings for sounds in words and progress to 4, 5 and 6 sounds in a word.

 

The Higher Levels of Phonics

Switch it Spell Sounds teaches children the concept that there are more than one spelling for a sound that they can hear in a word. With the help of Choose to Use Suze, they will find out all about ‘sounds the same but looks different’ and cool and not so cool choose to use spelling rules for up to 85 spellings for the 44 sounds of the English Language.

 

Tricky Words

Throughout each step of the way, the children will be introduced to tricky words. These are words which cannot be blended using known sounds. E.g. the, some, little, we, me, she.

 

In this section you will find videos and documents to support with using Supersonic Phonic Friends when reading and learning at home.