www.udaytonpublishing.es
POWER PHONICS
Consultant
CORAL GEORGE
Bio data
Coral Qualified as a teacher in Britain, started her career teaching in England, she has also
taught in Egypt and in the Bilingual MEC/British Council Project for eleven years.
She has world wide experience training teachers and has been trained by Sue Lloyd, Debbie
Hepplewhite and Ruth Miskin.
Coral is a “Synthetic Phonics Ambassador” she has trained in Europe, Middle and Far
East.
Coral advises schools and Institutions and she also collaborates with various Spanish and
British Universities.
Session outline
"Power Phonics" is a Synthetic Phonics programme used to improve comprehension,
pronunciation, reading and writing skills in infant and Primary Education in Spain.
The DFE. in UK. is promoting "Synthetic Phonics" as the only way to start reading and
writing.
The overall objective of this session will be to show teachers how Spanish students as
young as five can read books with more than one hundred words independently and how
they can use creative writing to convey information.
The Dfe. in the UK is implementing a Synthetic Phonics Programme called “Letters and
Sounds”. This programme explains the steps or phases that teachers must follow in order to
achieve high standards of literacy;
The presentation will show the theory about Synthetic Phonics and the author´s advice; it
will also include practical ideas to develop Power Phonics in the classroom.
It will be an interactive session where sounds will be presented through a multisensory
approach with movements to show the sound-grapheme correspondence; therefore teachers
will participate with Total Physical Response.
A short video where children are reading and writing will be shown during this session.
Part of this session will show the resources which are ready in order to implement Power
Phonics in the classroom.
Phonics
Phonics is a method that teaches children the alphabetic code of English. Children are
taught the 44 letter sounds, how to blend them to read words, segment them to write them
down and how to cope with the first few irregular words, then the children can read books
for themselves.
There are four main elements to the teaching:
1. Learning the Letter Sounds
The main 44 sounds of English are taught – one sound per session.
A multisensory method is used to introduce the children to the letter sounds. There is a
storyline, action and ‘Sound Sheet’ for each sound. By doing an action associated with
the sound and a song, ie SSSSSSSSSSStop (hold up hand) the children remember it
more easily.
Every session a new letter sound is taught so the children can play games, like pair the
sounds.
Digraphs are represented by two letters. The children need to recognise digraphs in
words, e.g., the ‘ai’ in ‘rain’. Some digraphs have more than one sound, the digraphs
‘oo’ and ‘th’ each have two sounds, e.g., ‘foot’ and ‘moon’, ‘that’ and ‘thin’.
2. Blending
Children need to be taught how to blend sounds together to hear a word. The aim is to
enable the children to hear the word when the teacher says the sounds, e.g., “Listen
carefully, what word am I saying … ‘c-a-t’?” At the beginning the teacher is modelling
reading and some children will hear ‘cat’. Try a few more words, e.g., ‘h-o-t’, t-oy’,
‘s-oa-p’.
Once the children can hear the word when the teacher says the sounds, they are ready to
try and blend words for themselves. Initially, being able to blend letter sounds fluently
is the essential skill for reading and should always be the first strategy for working out
unknown words. Children must also be able to recognise consonant blends and digraphs
in words such as ‘fl-a-g’ and ‘sh-o-p’.
After the letter sounds have been taught and the children can read simple, regular
words, they start taking home the ‘Word list’ for extra practice. The Word list start with
simple words made from the first group of letter sounds.
At first, one way of spelling each vowel sound is taught, e.g., ‘ai’ as in ‘rain’. The
children should have practice blending these spellings in words before the extra spelling
are introduced, e.g., ‘a-e’ as in ‘cake’ end ‘ay’ as in ‘play’.
Once the children have worked their way through the Word Lists, and learned some
irregular common keywords, they should be given storybooks to read for themselves.
3. Identifying Sounds in Words
It is essential that children can hear the individual sounds in words, especially for
writing. Initially, the children are asked to listen carefully and say if they can hear a
given sound in words. Start with words that have three sounds in them, for example, “Is
there a ‘s’ in ‘sun’ … ‘soap’ … ‘dog’?”; “If there is a ‘s’ where does it come – the
beginning, middle or end?” Using first the arm and hand movement. Then the children
are encouraged to say the sounds they hear. Practice by saying a word like ‘hat’, the
children should respond by saying ‘h-a-t’. As they say each sound they hold up a finger
‘h-a-t’ three sounds, ‘sh-ee-p’ three sounds, etc.
The teacher writes the letters on the board as the children say them. Then the children
look at the word, say the sounds and blend them to read the word. This gives a good
understanding of how reading and writing work. A few examples every day helps to
develop this skill.
4. Red Magic Words
When the majority of the children know about letter sounds and have been blending
regular words as a group activity, they can begin to learn about irregular words. “Red
Words” are words that cannot always be worked out by blending. These can be
introduced gradually: I, the, he, she...
Power Phonics Adaptations for the pre-primary EFL learner:
Power Phonics takes the basic concepts of synthetic phonics and adapts it to the second
language learner. How?
• Sound exposure is scaffolded, so that the first level introduces 24 sounds, the second
level deals with 34 sounds and the third and final level provides practice of the full 44
sounds.
• Tasks are scaffolded, meaning that the objective of the first level is purely to present
the sounds, the second level aims to review sounds already learnt, Sound discrimination
blending and segmenting, and only in the third level do they begin to work on letter
formation and pre-reading tasks.
• Sounds are introduced in direct conjunction with word and vocabulary items that the
children are learning in their L1 classroom as well as the L2 lessons: the vocabulary
items are directly linked to the pre-primary syllabus, which reduces the amount of noncontextualized unknown words that the children are exposed to.
• Lessons are planned to fit into the current exposure rates to L2: one 20 minute
session ( and one 20 minute optional extra lesson) per week : 30 weeks for level 1,
where children normally begin their L2 classes later on in the year, and 38 weeks for
levels 2 and 3.
5. Conclusion: Aims to Achieve
All the children by the end of Pre-Primary Education can:
• read and write the 44 letter sounds,
• blend regular words fluently, for example, ‘run’, ‘flag’, ‘rain’ and ‘bringing’, and
• write simple, regular words by listening for the sounds, for example, ‘cat’, ‘flag’,
‘bend’ and ‘sheep’.