Phonics

What is phonics?

When children are first learning to read, they need to know the letter sounds rather than the Alphabet names. This is because if you try to read a word using Alphabet names, it doesn’t work.

E.g. ‘cat’ If you say the alphabet names, C A T, it sounds like “see ay tee” and not sound like the word ‘cat’. We teach children to say the sounds “c- a –t” quickly and then blend them together to make ‘cat’. The children are taught a variety of sounds and then taught to blend to read them. The process which is used to teach them is called phonics.

How we teach it.

We teach phonics daily for 20 minutes per day across the school. The children are taught in ability groups across the key stages. We use programmes called Jolly Phonics in nursery and reception and Phonics Bug in key stage 1. Both run alongside Letters and Sound across the school which teach children new sounds and key words at a quick and rapid rate. During each session the children review previous taught sounds/words, are introduced to a new one and taught to apply the new sound/words to reading and writing through a range of engaging activities. The skills the children are taught in these sessions are applied throughout the curriculum. The children are regularly assessed and monitored in phonics and this is used to inform the planning.

At the end of year one all children will take a Phonic Screening Test. This will assess the children’s understanding of the sounds they are taught and how they use them to read words. If they do not reach the expected level they will retake it again in year two. Family Learning tasks and parents evenings are organised throughout the year to support parents and children at home.

Below are some links to help you help your child at home.

If you are unsure on how the sounds are pronounced then this link with help you. Copy and paste it into your browser.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P-eTO8L3t40

Useful webpages

http://www.letters-and-sounds.com

http://www.phonicsplay.co.uk

http://www.ictgames.com/literacy.html

http://www.bbc.co.uk/bitesize/ks1/literacy/phonics/play

The Terminology

Phoneme

A phoneme is the smallest unit of sound in a word It is generally accepted that most varieties of spoken English use about 44 phonemes.

Grapheme

A grapheme is a symbol of a phoneme. It is a letter or group of letters representing a sound.

Segmenting and blending

Segmenting consists of breaking words down into phonemes to spell. Blending consists of building words from phonemes to read. Both skills are important.

Digraph

This is when two letters come together to make a phoneme. For example, /oa/ makes the sound in ‘boat’ and is also known as a vowel digraph. There are also consonant digraphs, for example, /sh/ and /ch/.

Trigraph

This is when three letters come together to make one phoneme, for example /igh/.

Split digraph

A digraph in which the two letters are not adjacent – e.g. make

Abbreviations

VC, CVC, and CCVC are the respective abbreviations for vowel-consonant, consonantvowel-consonant, consonant-consonant-vowel-consonant, and are used to describe the order of graphemes in words (e.g. am (VC), Sam (CVC), slam (CCVC), or each (VC), beach (CVC), bleach (CCVC).

How it works

Phase 1

Phase One of ‘Letters and Sounds’ concentrates on developing children's speaking and listening skills and lays the foundations for the phonic work which starts in Phase 2. The emphasis during Phase 1 is to get children attuned to the sounds around them and ready to begin developing oral blending and segmenting skills. Phase 1 is divided into seven aspects.

Each aspect contains three strands:

* Tuning in to sounds (auditory discrimination)

* Listening and remembering sounds (auditory memory and sequencing)

* Talking about sounds (developing vocabulary and language comprehension)

Phase 2

In Phase 2, letters and their sounds are introduced one at a time. A set of letters is taught each week, in the following sequence:

Set 1: s, a, t, p

Set 2: i, n, m, d

Set 3: g, o, c, k

Set 4: ck, e, u, r

Set 5: h, b, f, ff, l, ll, ss

The children will begin to learn to blend and segment to help begin reading and spelling. This will begin with simple words.

Words using set 1:

at sat pat sat sap

Words using set 1 and 2:

Words using set 1-3:

 Words using set 1-4:

 Words using set 1-5:

Alongside this, children are introduced to tricky words.  These are the words that are irregular.  This means that phonics cannot be applied to the reading and spelling of these words.

The tricky words introduced in phase 2 are:

Phase 3

By the time children reach Phase 3, they will already be able to blend and segment words

containing the 19 letters taught in Phase 2. Over the twelve weeks which Phase 3 is expected

to last, twenty-five new graphemes are introduced (one at a time).

Set 6: j, v, w, x

Set 7: y, z, zz, qu

Consonant digraphs: ch, sh, th, ng

Vowel digraphs: ai, ee, igh, oa, oo, ar, or, ur, ow, oi, ear, air, ure, er