Interested in supporting your
child’s essential literacy skills at
home?
These slides include some
useful advice to help you to work
with us in this.
Literacy:• Reading (and phonics)
• Writing
• Communication
Better literacy skills
means better
progress and
achievement across
all subjects.
• Most important things –
• Talking and listening
• Reading with your child
• Highlighting interesting examples and the
usefulness of reading, writing and communication
skills in the world around us.
You could also introduce language games, quizzes
and competitions…
• PHONICS
• Support correct pronunciation of sounds.
• Support a wide, varied and appropriate
vocabulary.
• We all need to use the same language at
home and at school.
• Little and often is the key. Does not have to
be formal.
• Link it to your child’s interests.
PHONEME
• The smallest unit of sound in a word.
• There are 44 phonemes that we teach.
The 44 phonemes
/b/
/d/
/f/
/g/
/h/
/j/
/c/
/l/
/m/
/n/
/ng/
/p/
/r/
/s/
/t/
/v/
/w/
/y/
/z/
/th/
/th/
/ch/
/sh/
/s (je)/
/a/
/e/
/i/
/o/
/u/
/ai/
/ee/ /igh/ /oa/
/ew/ /oo/ /ar/ /ir/
/or/ /er/ /ow/ /oi/
/air/ /ear/ /ure/
GRAPHEME
• Letters representing a phoneme
e.g.
c
ai
igh
Children need to practise
recognising the grapheme and
saying the phoneme that it
represents.
BLENDING
• Recognising the letter sounds in a written word, for example
c-u-p
and merging or ‘blending’ them in the order in which they are
written to pronounce the word ‘cup’.
Encourage blending words with single phonemes and then move
on to ….
• DIGRAPHS – where 2 letters make 1 sound
ll
ss zz oa
ai
• TRIGRAPHS – where 3 letters that make 1 sound
igh dge
Phoneme identification activities –
you could try this with words your
child reads incorrectly.
Have a go with the words below:
• shelf
• dress
• sprint
• String
Did you get it right?
• shelf = sh – e – l – f
• dress = d - r - e – ss
= 4 phonemes
= 4 phonemes
• sprint = s – p – r – i – n – t = 6 phonemes
• string = s – t – r – i – ng = 5 phonemes
TRICKY WORDS
• Words that are not phonically decodeable
• e.g. was, the, I
Words like these still use graphemes to represent sounds –
phonics- but less frequently.
Many of these words are on the Catch All Spellings Chart
and it might be useful to practise spelling and reading
these words to learn them.
The more unusual graphemes:
I
the
come
of
any
because
woman
could
you
through
sure
walked
more
thought
does
young
four
bhaji
who
badger
table
gnat, machine
rhino
scent.,castle
regime, collage, revision
special, sure, schedule, pension, tissue, passion,
clothes, xylophone
mosque
picture
called
cough
ghost, guest, league
laugh
great, rein,eight,chalet,they.
bear. Their, where.
half,are,laugh, heart
,said,says,frends
people, police,piece
zero,really, here,we’re
verandah, little, thorough, colour,
metre, sulphur
earth,were
orange,build,gym
height, eye,tries, buy
because, cough
goes, though
bouy
flu fruit
tour
plough
Now you have the knowledge….
• Help your child to know all of the phonic sounds and
spellings for them – many sounds have multiple spellings.
• Read as much as possible with your child and yourself when
your child’s around to show that you value reading.
• Lots and lots of encourage and praise –a good guess is a
good start and usually part of the word is being spelt or read
correctly so praise that.
• Ask for information from the school if you want to know
more.
Useful websites
• www.parentsintouch.co.uk
• www.bbc.co.uk/schools/parents
• www.jollylearning.co.uk/
• www.focusonphonics.co.uk/
• www.syntheticphonics.com