Year 1 School Kit

The complete phonics solution for your School at Year 1. Covers alternative vowel sounds, sound families and an introduction to suffixes. The Teacher Planner sets out all the lessons for the year, and a handy calendar presents these according to the school terms. There is also a number of revision lesson included as preparation for the Phonics Screening Check (PSC).

The kit itself includes 18 x 168 different decodable reader titles. These are the various genres of fiction, non-fiction, science and HiLo so there are plenty of topics to choose for the children. Each decodable clearly presents the progression in the front of the reader, along with and tricky or common exception words that are used in the text. Furthermore, for the Sound Family decodables, there is a phoneme progression and a table that shows words that are included in the text that make the target phoneme but are grouped according to the different spellings of that phoneme. The Fix Its range of decodables does the same thing, but instead uses suffixes and embeds these into the text so that children can practise these spelling formations in their reading. Finally, six sets of 12 Read and Write Decodables are included to support the transition of decoding skills into writing.

There are a number of supplementary resources included in the kit to support learning and these are referenced in the Teacher Planner. These include: a Phoneme Frieze, Phonemic Awareness cards, Grapheme to Phoneme cards, Phoneme Frame cards, Common Exception Word cards, High Frequency Word cards, Alien Word cards, Suffix cards, Homophone cards and Rainbow Phonic magnetic letters.

The phoneme frieze is included for classroom decoration and visually displays with various Sound Families taught in Year 1.

The Rainbow Phonic magnetic letters are colour-coded around their phonemes and are also joined to represent digraphs (and trigraphs) as one unit of sound. Every daily lesson in the Teacher Planner has a table with quick reference to words that can be built at that stage according to the progression.

The GPC cards (grapheme to phoneme cards) are central to the programme and these provide an easy to remember mnemonic so that children can grasp a newly introduced letter sound and match these with other cards containing graphemes that also make the target sound.

Common exception word cards provide examples of the common exception words that run parallel to the progression. Unique to this programme are sound speech marks that help children correctly identify the tricky part of the word. There are also high frequency word cards that don’t contain tricky elements and phoneme frame cards for daily practice. Both card sets have a write and wipe surface so that they can also be used for handwriting practice.

Alien word cards are provided for that a nonsense word can be introduced daily (according to the progression) and decoded. These cards can also be used alongside the various assessments provided in the planner and throughout the programme.

Finally, Homophone cards provide examples of words where the sounds are the same but the spellings are different. This enables children to see how a grapheme with a common sound can change the meaning of a word.