Letters & Sounds Programme Overview

The Junior Learning Letters & Sounds programme provides complete continuity for teachers through its fidelity to the original Letters & Sounds framework and progression. It is one of the only validated programmes to extend from Nursery to Year 2 (Phases 1 to 6), and is the most comprehensive programme with over 500 decodable readers and 2000 pages of daily lessons. Further, it extends Letters & Sounds through innovative supplementary resources, such as speech marks (for phonemes) and sound buttons (for graphemes). All resources are designed to work alongside daily lessons with simple layouts to make learning easy and fun.

There is a focus on handwriting formation and strong emphasis on Common Exception Words. Common Exception Words (CEWs) have been ordered in their own progression, which runs parallel to the letter progression. This allows for multiple CEWs to be presented with different spelling patterns but similar phonemes so that children can see the exception components as well as the decodable components. Children are empowered to phonemically analyse new words from their grapheme-to-phoneme knowledge and to identify irregular elements as they occur.

The programme is comprehensive. It has the largest collection of decodable readers and supplementary resources – all following the progression. According to the DfE, ‘the books are engaging and well put together – children will really like them.’ Overall, Junior Learning Letters & Sounds Teacher Planners offer a complete systematic synthetic phonics (SSP) programme that provides children with the best opportunities for progressing to reading fluency, spelling proficiency and a love of literacy.