Links to the National Curriculum

Want to see how the national curriculum relates to the topics covered in each chapter?

You can review the National Curriculum for 2014 here and read how each chapter supports meeting these requirements below:

Chapter 3       Reception: Developing phonemic awareness 

Early Learning Goals (ELGs)

READING

Children use phonic knowledge to decode regular words and read them aloud accurately. They also read some common irregular words.

WRITING

Children use their phonic knowledge to write words in ways which match their spoken sounds. They also write some irregular common words. They write simple sentences which can be read by themselves and others. Some words are spelt correctly and others are phonetically plausible.

Chapter 4       Reception: Beginning to read and write using CVC words 

Early Learning Goals (ELGs)

READING

Children use phonic knowledge to decode regular words and read them aloud accurately. They also read some common irregular words.

WRITING

Children use their phonic knowledge to write words in ways which match their spoken sounds. They also write some irregular common words. They write simple sentences which can be read by themselves and others. Some words are spelt correctly and others are phonetically plausible.

Chapter 5       Year 1: Teaching grapheme–phoneme correspondences

Key Stage 1 statutory requirement

Year 1

The boundary between revision of work covered in Reception and the introduction of new work may vary according to the programme used, but basic revision should include:

  • all letters of the alphabet and the sounds which they most commonly represent, consonant digraphs which have been taught and the sounds which they represent;
  • vowel digraphs which have been taught and the sounds which they represent;
  • the process of segmenting spoken words into sounds before choosing graphemes to represent the sounds;
  • words with adjacent consonants;
  • guidance and rules which have been taught.

Chapter 6       Year 1: Long vowel digraphs

Year 1

SPELLING

The boundary between revision of work covered in Reception and the introduction of new work may vary according to the programme used, but basic revision should include:

  • all letters of the alphabet and the sounds which they most commonly represent;
  • consonant digraphs which have been taught and the sounds which they represent;
  • vowel digraphs which have been taught and the sounds which they represent.

Chapter 7       Year 1: Decoding and encoding text

Year 1

Pupils should be taught to:

  • apply phonic knowledge and skills as the route to decode words respond speedily with the correct sound to graphemes (letters or groups of letters) for all 40+ phonemes, including, where applicable, alternative sounds for graphemes
  • read accurately by blending sounds in unfamiliar words containing GPCs that have been taught:
  • read common exception words, noting unusual correspondences between spelling and sound and where these occur in the word read words containing taught GPCs and -s, -es, -ing, -ed, -er and -est endings
  • read other words of more than one syllable that contain taught GPCs
  • read aloud accurately books that are consistent with their developing phonic knowledge and that do not require them to use other strategies to work out words.

Chapter 8       Years 1 and 2: Morphemes – prefixes, suffixes and root words

Year 1

Pupils should be taught to:

  • add prefixes and suffixes:
  • using the spelling rule for adding -or -es as the plural marker for nouns and the third person singular marker for verbs
  • using the prefix un-
  • using -ing-ed-er and -est where no change is needed in the spelling of root words [for example, helpinghelpedquickerquickest].

Year 2

The meaning of new words should be explained to pupils within the context of what they are reading, and they should be encouraged to use morphology (such as prefixes) to work out unknown words.

Formation of nouns using suffixes such as -ness-er and by compounding [for example, whiteboardsuperman].

Chapter 9       Year 2: Homophones and contractions

Homophones and contractions are a feature of the National Curriculum at Key Stage 1 and beyond.

Key Stage 1 statutory requirement

Year 1

Pupils should be taught to:

  • read words with contractions [for example, I’mI’llwe’ll], and understand that the apostrophe represents the omitted letter(s).

Year 2

Pupils should be taught to:

  • learn new ways of spelling phonemes for which one or more spellings are already known, and learn some words with each spelling, including a few common homophones
  • distinguish between homophones and near-homophones.

Chapter 10     Year 2: Phonics into spelling

Year 2

Pupils should be taught to spell by:

  • segmenting spoken words into phonemes and representing these by graphemes, spell­ing many correctly;
  • learning new ways of spelling phonemes for which one or more spellings are already known, and learn some words with each spelling, including a few common homophones;
  • learning to spell common exception words;
  • learning to spell more words with contracted forms;
  • learning the possessive apostrophe (singular) [for example, the girl’s book];
  • distinguishing between homophones and near-homophones;
  • adding suffixes to spell longer words, including -ment-ness-ful-les;
  • applying spelling rules and guidance, as listed in English Appendix 1.