At Sheepy Magna we teach phonics using a linguistic phonics programme called Sounds-Write – a proven Systematic Synthetic Phonics programme validated by the Department for Education. It is based on the science of reading and provides a structured, cumulative, and code-oriented approach to teaching reading and spelling. It starts with what children learn naturally, the sounds of their own language, and teaches them to represent those sounds in writing. Sounds-Write is a complete phonics curriculum that teaches the skills, concepts, and code knowledge necessary for children to read and spell.

Students are taught four key concepts:
         1. Letters are symbols that represent sounds
         2. Sounds can be spelled using 1, 2, 3 or 4 letters (dog, street, night, dough)
         3. The same sound can be spelled in different ways (rain, break, stay, gate)
         4. The same spelling can represent different sounds (head, seat, break)

Students are taught to master three key skills:
         1. Segmenting - the ability to pull apart the individual sounds in words
         2. Blending - the ability to push sounds together to build words
         3. Phoneme manipulation - the ability to insert sounds into and delete sounds out of words. This skill is necessary to test out alternatives for spellings that represent more than one sound.