Personally, I don't think 6 weeks is necessarily going to be long enough if you want all the children in your class to be able to blend and segment cvc words orally, recognise and find the 19 letters and blend and segment vc words. However, it is not necessary for all of them to be able to do this before moving on to Phase 3.
I explained to my friend that I was using Phonics International as a program, with some Jolly Phonics resources and lots of my own resources, which is what I had been using for the past 5 years. I am not concerned with whether it should or shouldn't take 6 weeks to teach a set of skills. I want to know that all my children are keeping up with my pace of teaching and that none of my children are getting bored because we are going too slow. This is where the layered approach comes in. You need to ensure that new learning is being introduced to extend those who learn quickly, and keep revising old learning for those who are slower at picking things up.
I think the PI resources are particularly good for both extension and revision. There are so many different activities that all my children are being catered for. I am lucky enough to have the most wonderful full time TA in my Reception Class, and she does a lot of the revision work on a 1 to 1 basis daily. After 6 weeks of teaching we assessed our children to see which of them needed further consolidation of the sounds we had already taught. We decided that there were 6 children out of our 26 who weren't picking up the sounds as quickly as the majority of the class. To stop them "falling behind" my TA spent a couple of minutes (during register time mostly) each day doing grapheme flashcards with each child. Within a few weeks all 6 were in line with the majority of the rest of the class in regards to how many grapheme - phoneme correspondences they recognised.
At the same time (well, different time of the day obviously! no, she's not quite superwoman!) my wonderful TA also took out pairs of children to do blending activities / games using cvc words then very quickly cvcc ccvc and ccvcc words. These children were the ones who seemed to be picking up everything very quickly. This was done during the time when I was doing the revision of phonemes with the rest of the class. Again it was only a few minutes each day, but it had a great effect.
To get back to the original question, I think the only answer can be that until the majority of your class are comfortable with the GPCs taught in Phase 2 and are manipulating those GPCs in blending and segmenting activities, then lots of revision and extension can be done without necessarily introducing new learning (ie starting Phase 3). My friend (quite recently qualified) could understand the point I was making and agreed that she needed to use her professional judgement, but was worried that as an NQT she didn't really have any.
What does everyone else think?
Does anyone feel constrained to move on even though they are unsure that the children are ready, because Letters and Sounds says so?
What is a decent pace at which to introduce GPCs? Personally I agree with Debbie that 3 per week seems about right in my class, which is actually less than Letters and Sounds suggests, but feels right to me.
I'd love to hear about other peoples experiences.
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