ABSTRACT
This chapter provides a more detailed description of phonics, based on the observations of the practice in one particular school, St Hilda. Most phonics lessons started with a revision of sounds the children had recently learned. These revisions are part of the programme design. While new sounds and new words are introduced at regular intervals, children continue to practise and revise the sounds they know already, as suggested in the teacher handbook and lesson plans which are part of the Read Write Inc. package. Read Write Inc. tries to address the complexity of the English spelling system by teaching children all the different possible graphemes that can represent a specific sound. As it adopts a staged introduction of sounds from easy to complex, children can start with sound letter combinations that match easily and which give them the satisfaction of being able to quickly start reading simple words, such as 'cat' or 'dog'.
