Welcome! Help yourself to tea and coffee.
Workshop Outline
 Lifelong Readers
 How we teach reading at Kings Worthy
 Introduction to Phonics
 Approaches to Phonics
 Ideas to support reading at home
 Questions
Lifelong Readers
 Nurturing a love of reading
 Reading isn’t a race – don’t panic!
 Reading for pleasure
 Reading for meaning
How We Teach Reading
 Daily Phonics – focus on decoding
 Groups
 Letter recognition
The Rose Report
 Sound blending
- 2006
 Whole word recognition
 Shared Reading
 Whole class or in groups
 Aspects of reading – holding the book, text direction, title, blurb
 Focus on comprehension skills and reading for pleasure
 Guided Reading
 Weekly from after half term, in small groups (approx. 6)
 Taught comprehension focus e.g. describing characters
 Applying phonic skills
 Individual Reading
 For assessment
What is Phonics?
 What is phonics – Method for teaching reading and
writing based on smallest units of sound in words
 Based on Letters and Sounds government document
 Taught daily in groups at the level each child is
working at
English Language
 The English language is made up of:
 44 phonemes (sounds),
 Represented by 26 letters,
 In about 140 combinations.
Key principles
Sounds (phonemes) are represented by letters (graphemes)
Focus is on letter sound at first, names later.
A phoneme can be represented by one letter (grapheme) or
by a group of 2 or more letters.
e.g. sh, igh, ea.
The same sound (phoneme) can be spelt in more than one
way.
e.g. cat, kennel, choir, sack
The same grapheme (spelling) may represent more than one
phoneme
Mean – deaf
Crown – flown
Field – tie
Identify the phonemes!
pet
born
shed
care
night
Skills used in phonics
Blending for reading
Merging phonemes together to pronounce a word.
In order to read an unfamiliar word, a child must link a phoneme to each letter or
letter group in a word and then merge them together to say the word.
sh – o – p
t – ai – l
Segmentation for spelling
Hearing individual phonemes within a word.
E.g. crash has 4 phonemes c – r – a – sh
In order to spell a word a child must segment a word into the individual
phonemes and choose a letter or letter combination to represent the phonemes.
For example a child may write:
‘The cat was blak. It had a wight tail and a pinc noas.’
Approaches
 The importance of speaking and hearing sounds in the
early stages
 Songs, nursery rhymes, games
 Ruth Miskin Read Write Inc.
 Cued articulation
 Rhyme
 Alliteration
 Segmenting and blending
 “Robot Arms”
 Cursive handwriting
Reading- setting the scene
 The colour band system
 The starting point: reading from pictures
 Ensure you are both relaxed and it is enjoyable,
not a chore (for either yourself or your child!) It
should always be a successful experience!
 Choose a suitable environment – quiet and
comfortable, no tv!
 Please write in your child’s planner when they
have read and a brief comment on how they got
on.
Reading- Strategies
 Book orientation- ‘Debugging’ the book, Look through for
tricky words and names, discuss pictures.
 Write out any tricky words and learn them prior to reading.
 Get the children to build words with magnetic letters.
 Phoneme spotting – can you spot a ‘s’?
 Encourage children to look at the pictures to help support
their reading- don’t cover them up!
 Decoding:
 Sounding out the words and blending them together.
 Reading around a difficult word and trying to work it out.
 Recognition of high frequency and tricky words
Reading for meaning
 We choose books with the children twice a week, we talk to
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them about their choices and look at any follow up they may
have done.
Encourage children to re-read sentences if they’ve misread
words OR if they’ve had to decode words which interrupt the
fluency
Don’t be afraid to demonstrate, then ask them to copy!
Comprehension questions- check the back of the books.
Look at the comprehension activities in the front of your
planner for ideas, children can draw/write a response, stick in
photos or you can write it for them.
Keywords
 Keywords (or tricky words) – can’t be sounded out, e.g.
the, to, all
 45 Reception key words
 Keyrings
 The importance of discussion
 Questions to ask your child
• Who is your favourite character in the story and why?
• Which words in this sentence can you recognise without sounding out?
• Which sounds can you see in this word?
• What does the picture tell you about what is happening in the story?
• What happened at the beginning of the story? What happened at the end?
• Did you enjoy this story? Why?
• What do you think will happen next?
• Does the word you have sounded out make sense if you read the whole
sentence again?
• How many words are in this sentence? Can you point at each of them?
• Can you point to where we need to start reading?
• Which is your favourite page of this book and why?
Key Messages
 Always use pure sounds when sounding out – as demonstrated
 Reading and spelling skills go hand in hand
 Use of letter names when spelling words and letter sounds for
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sounding out words E.g to spell sock would be S O C K but to
sound it out would be only 3 sounds s-o-ck
When reading, encourage children to segment new words,
then blend together
When spelling, encourage children to segment words they
want to spell into the smallest chunks possible eg c-l-o-ck,
rather than cl-ock. Then blend together to check they have
got it right
Use robot arms, sound buttons and phoneme frames when
practising reading and spelling
Enjoy it!
Resources to take away
 Cued articulation action sheet
 Oral blending and segmenting activity ideas
 Ruth Miskin Sound Cards
 School handwriting policy
 Terminology sheet
 Question sheet to encourage discussion about your child’s
reading book
 Reception 45 keywords
 Year One and Two keywords
Questions