At Sir Henry Fermor C of E Primary School, we are passionate about ensuring all children become confident and enthusiastic readers and writers. We believe that phonics provides the foundations of learning to make the development into fluent reading and writing easier. Through daily, systematic and consistent high quality phonics teaching, children learn to segment words to support their spelling ability and blend sounds to read words. To allow our children to develop a strong phonic awareness and effective blending and decoding skills, we have chosen to use a synthetic phonics programme called Supersonic Phonic Friends produced by Anna Lucas and based on ‘Letters and Sounds’. Supersonic Phonic Friends is a method of learning centred around letter sounds and phonics, blending sounds together to read and spell words, and the children apply these skills across the curriculum.  Using Supersonic Phonic Friends the children learn to read fluently so that they can put all their energy into comprehending what they read.  We passionately believe that teaching children to read and write independently is one of the core purposes of a primary school, enabling them to access a broad and exciting curriculum and ensuring they flourish as learners throughout their time at our school. These fundamental skills not only hold the keys to the rest of the curriculum but also have a huge impact on children’s self-esteem and future life chances.