19th November 2013
OVERVIEW

Why phonics?

‘Letters and Sounds’ and how it is taught within school

Government Phonics Screening Check

Practical ideas for helping your child with phonics at
home
WHAT IS PHONICS?

Phonics is a way of teaching children to read skilfully and
quickly

They are taught how to
Recognise the sound that each individual letter makes
 Identify the sounds different letter combinations make
 Blend sounds together from left to right

Children can then use this knowledge to de-code new words
they hear or see.
Research shows when phonics is taught in a structured way
starting from the easiest sounds to most complex, it is the most
effective way of teaching young children to read.
AT LYNDHURST
In school, we follow the Letters and Sounds
programme. Letters and Sounds is a phonics
resource published by the Department for
Education which consists of six phases.
AT LYNDHURST

Daily sessions of phonics

Daily literacy lessons

Daily guided reading sessions





Read with teacher
Follow up activity
Reading for pleasure
Reading topic books
Phonics activities or games
Children are given the opportunity to apply and consolidate
their learning
TERMINOLOGY
Phoneme – The smallest unit of sound in a word
Grapheme – What we write to represent the sound
Segmenting – Breaking words down into individual sounds
Blending – Recognising sounds and blending to read
Digraph – Two letters which make one sound
Trigraph – three letters which make one sound
Split digraph – two letters split making one sound
EARLY YEARS

Phase 1 – preparing the ground (listening, body
percussion, voice sounds, instrumental sounds,
alliteration, oral blending and segmenting, learning
letter names, rhythm and rhyme)

Phase 2 – developing knowledge of common consonants
and vowels, blending and segmenting CVC words.
Learning to read some tricky words.

Phase 3 – developing knowledge of one grapheme for
each of the 44 phonemes, blending and segmenting CVC
words. Learning to read and spell tricky words.
READY FOR YEAR ONE
 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
 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
PHASE 4 - START OF YEAR 1
This
phase consolidates all the
children have learnt in previous
phases
PHASE 5
Children
will be taught new graphemes and
alternative pronunciations for these
graphemes.
Vowel digraphs: ay, ou, ie, ea, oy, ir, ue, aw,
ew, oe, au
 Split digraphs: a_e, e_e, i_e, o_e, u_e
SEGMENTING
Breaking
down words for spelling.
cat
c a t
SEGMENTING
Queen
qu ee n
BLENDING
Building words from phonemes to
read.
c a t
cat
BLENDING
Qu ee n
queen
HFW & TRICKY WORDS

For children to develop fluency when reading they need to be
able to read high frequency words on sight.

These are words that are mostly not de-codable and need to be
recognised as a whole
 e.g said, they, was come

These are taught as tricky words.

Children develop their ability to do this over time.
YEAR 2 - PHASE 6
• During this phase children become fluent readers and increasingly
accurate spellers
• Children decode words silently and quickly and read hundreds of words
automatically
• At this point, comprehension strategies are developed so that children clarify
meaning, ask and answer questions about the texts they are reading, construct
mental images during reading and summarise what they have read.
• In spelling children are introduced to the adding of suffixes , prefixes and how
to spell longer words.
WHAT DOES A PHONICS LESSON LOOK
LIKE?
Revisit/review Flashcards to practice
phonemes learnt so far.
Teach
Teach new phoneme air
Practice
Buried treasure
Air, zair, fair, hair, lair, pair,
vair, sair, thair
Read captions:
The goat had a long beard.
The quack was right in his ear.
Apply
PHONICS SCREENING CHECK – YEAR 1
• In June all Year One children will be expected to
undertake a phonics check.
• The aim is to check that a child is making progress in
phonics.
• If a child has not reached the expected standard we
will ensure that additional support is given to help
your child progress in year 2.
YEAR 1 PHONICS CHECK
SUPPORT
In
class – differentiation
Small
group activities
1-2-1
precision teaching
Specialist
support
RESOURCES
http://www.phonicsplay.co.uk
http://www.ictgames.com/literacy.html
http://www.bbc.co.uk/cbeebies/grownups/article/thealphablocks-guide-to-phonics
http://www.galacticphonics.com/