What is ‘Phonics’?

Phonics is fun!

Phonics

• It is using the sounds (Phonemes)

of our language to build words for speaking, reading and writing.

PHONICS

PHONEMES

• A phoneme is the smallest unit of sound in a word.

• A phoneme may be made up of one or more letters which make one sound.

Notice how the three phonemes sound the

same.

Two new shoes

• We use a range of strategies, games and activities to engage the children and help them develop the skills they need for decoding(reading) and encoding (writing). In Greenfylde we base our scheme on Letters and Sounds.

PHONICS

• Letters and Sounds is a phonics resource published by the Department for Education and Skills. It aims to build children's speaking and listening skills in their own right as well as to prepare children for learning to read by developing their phonic knowledge and skills. It sets out a detailed and systematic programme for teaching phonic skills for children starting by the age of five, with the aim of them becoming fluent readers by age seven.

‘Letters and Sounds’

Phase Phonic Knowledge and Skills

Phase One (Nursery/Reception) Activities are divided into seven aspects, including environmental sounds, instrumental sounds, body sounds, rhythm and rhyme, alliteration, voice sounds and finally oral blending and segmenting.

Phase Two (Reception) up to 6 weeks Learning 19 letters of the alphabet and one sound for each. Blending sounds together to make words. Segmenting words into their separate sounds. Beginning to read simple captions.

Phase Three (Reception) up to 12 weeks The remaining 7 letters of the alphabet, one sound for each. Graphemes such as ch, oo, th representing the remaining phonemes not covered by single letters. Reading captions, sentences and questions. On completion of this phase, children will have learnt the "simple code", i.e. one grapheme for each phoneme in the English language.

Phase Four (Reception) 4 to 6 weeks No new grapheme-phoneme correspondences are taught in this phase. Children learn to blend and segment longer words with adjacent consonants, e.g. swim, clap, jump.

Phase Five (Throughout Year 1) Now we move on to the "complex code". Children learn more graphemes for the phonemes which they already know, plus different ways of pronouncing the graphemes they already know.

Phase Six (Throughout Year 2 and beyond) Working on spelling, including prefixes and suffixes, doubling and dropping letters etc.

• 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, pSet 2: i, n, m, dSet 3: g, o, c, kSet 4: ck, e, u, rSet 5: h, b, f, ff, l, ll, ss

Phase 2

• By the time they reach Phase 3, children 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

Phase 3

Tricky Words

• Tricky words (Words that are not phonetically decodable) are taught at each phase in line with sounds and the expectations of being able to read appropriate level texts.

• So although there is a heavy emphasis on Phonics first sight vocabulary is also still taught alongside.

Games

• Make it fun and the children readily join in.

• Games like NSEW, sound on your back, sounds alike and alien words are active ways for them to join in.

• Lots of websites offer free games.

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

•

Spot the odd one out.

• Look carefully at the words below.

• Can you spot the phoneme that is common to each set?

• Which word doesn’t share the common phoneme?

• tree feet grew sleep

• rain pain mail slap

• know seat grow show

• Boat away play stay

Phoneme Fallout.

• Some of the phonemes have fallen out of the words below.

Can you guess if the missing phoneme is… oo, ew or ue?

• S n thr c l r m

• Ch sch l cr l kn

oo ew ue oo

ew oo ue ew