In the Song of Sounds programme, letter formation is taught alongside GPCs to ensure handwriting skills are also developed, and correct letter formation is achieved. In every daily session there is instruction on how to form each letter with a bit of handwriting ‘patter’ for the teacher to use to model forming the letter correctly with clear start and finish points. As per the Department for Education guidance, we teach a pre-cursive style rather than cursive. Upper case formation is also taught in Stage 1 in the Summer term and high quality resources are provided to support the children in this.

We encourage schools to also make time to teach handwriting outside the phonics lesson. See below for our information sheets to remind you of the letter formation phrase and pronunciation phrase for each grapheme.

Once your children have established letter formation please use your school handwriting policy/programme to teach handwriting.