Phonics

Most important thing – From a very early age…

• Talking and Listening.• Reading with and to your child

• Playing listening games• Singing songs and rhymes• Simple movement games

• Correct pronunciation• Correct 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 (in school it is every day for 20 mins)

• Link it to your child’s interests.

Essentials

Phase 1 Phase one of letters and sounds

programme is all about developing your child’s listening skills and most of this is done through rhymes and listening games.

The programme is divided into 7 aspects and 3 strands

The Seven aspects.1. General sound discrimination-

environmental sounds.2. General sound discrimination-

instrumental sounds.3. General sound discrimination- body

percussion.4. Rhythm and rhyme.5. Alliteration6. Voice sounds.7. Oral blending and segmenting.

The 3 strandsEach aspect is divided into

three strands:• Tuning into sounds.• Listening and remembering

sounds.• Talking about sounds.

About the activities

All the activities within the programme help children to

• Listen attentively• Enlarge their vocabulary• Speak confidently• Discriminate phonemes• Begin to segment words

Games in aspects 1-4Some of the games and activities

in aspects 1-3 are going for listening walks, playing sound lotto games, making up sound stories, guessing instrument sounds, making up actions to go with songs, follow the leader games and singing rhymes.

Later in aspect 4 we play lots of rhyming games, rhyming bingo, finish the rhyme and guess the odd one out.

Games in strands 5-7Strands 5-7 focus children on

hearing and recognising letter sounds.

• Playing I spy games, finding objects with the same initial sound, using mirrors to see how their mouth makes each sound.

• Making long/short sounds, animal sounds and using different voices.

• Making teddy talk, crossing the river games, feely bag games.

Phase 2Learning 19 letters of the alphabet and

one sound for each.

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

•Blending sounds together to make words (reading). •Segmenting words into their separate sounds (spelling). •Beginning to read simple captions.

BLENDINGRecognising 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’

SEGMENTING• ‘Chopping Up’ the word to spell it out

• The opposite of blending• Use your ‘ROBOT ARMS’

TRICKY WORDS• Words that are not phonically decodeable

• e.g. was, the, I• Some are ‘tricky’ to start with but will become decodeable once we have learned the harder phonemes

• e.g. out, there

Phase 2

the to gono is itin atand

I

Tricky Words!

Phase 3

ch chip ar farmsh shop or forth thin/then ur hurtng ring ow cowai rain oi coinee feet ear dearigh night air fairoa boat ure sureoo boot/look er corner

Set 6: j v w xSet 7: y z zz qu

Phase 3Tricky Words

he she theto no goI we mebe was myyou they herall are

The ProcessRevisit/Review

Practise previously learned phonemes (sounds), graphemes (letters) and tricky words

Teachnew phonemes,graphemes and tricky words

Practiseblending to read and segmenting to spell

ApplyRead or write a caption or sentence using phonics and tricky words

Phase 4No new sounds are taught in this phase.

Children learn to blend (read) and segment (spell):

• longer words with adjacent consonantse.g. swim, clap, jump

• two-syllable words e.g. lunchbox