What happens before phonics?

We recognise that pupils need to develop certain physical and sensory skills before they are ready to begin systematic, synthetic phonics. These include both visual perception and listening skills, motor development skills, sound discrimination, and exposure to rhythm and rhyme, in addition to communication development, where pupils have plenty of opportunities for communicating and hearing stories, songs and rhymes. Pupils at this stage of learning have opportunities for developing all these skills planned as part of their phonics provision, enabling them to prepare for beginning synthetic phonics through the Song of Sounds programme.

Pre phonics

We use Development Matters and research into what comes before phonics to ensure we appropriately develop children’s knowledge, skills and understanding from the earliest stages of development. Before children are ready for formal phonics they need to first develop communication skills, understanding of language and be able to focus, attend and engage. At Palatine we use shared communication activities and shared attention activities to support children develop these skills. These include Intensive Interaction, TACPAC, Musical Mats, Music and Movement, and Story Massage. To develop shared attention some children will use Attention Autism. Pupils working at this level have a daily taught session of communication.
Children are often ready to begin Stage 0 when they have communication skills to comment and can attend or be re-engaged for a short activity.

Stage 0

It is likely there will be an overlap between Pre Phonics and Stage 0. The balance will be specific to individual children and more Stage 0 will be introduced as children develop their knowledge, skills and understanding.
Stage 0 is a progressive programme which supports pupils to initially develop their awareness of sounds in general and later apply the knowledge, skills and understanding to awareness of sounds in words and speech. The programme is underpinned by songs and rhymes as we these have a hugely positive impact on language and literacy development.
In early stage 0 children are developing an awareness of sound in general and they do this through these 3 areas: environmental sounds, instrumental sounds and body percussion. Through activities in early Stage 0 children learn to copy, make and identify the different sounds they hear and produce. All the input we give children in this area builds on the communication and attention skills children have learnt in pre-phonics.
Late stage 0 is where children start to be exposed to sounds in words and how these are different or the same as each other. There is planned exposure to oral blending and segmenting to support children to develop this fundamental aspect of learning to read.