1. Phonics Meeting for Parents

2. Why teach phonics? The ability to read and write well is a vital skill for all children, paving the way for an enjoyable and successful school experience. Phonics helps children to develop good reading and spelling skills e.g. cat can be sounded out for reading and spelling We use a scheme called letters and sounds.

3. Phonics at a glance Phonics is… Blending Segmenting Knowing the alphabet (sounds and letter names)

4. Some Definitions A phoneme This is the smallest unit of sound in a word. How many phonemes can you hear in cat?

5. A grapheme These are the spelling choices that make a ai ay. For example the sound ai can be spelt ai or ay A sound with 2 letters to make is called a digraph A sound with 3 letters to make it is called a trigraph e.g igh

6. A phoneme you hearA grapheme is its spelling choice

7. How to say the sounds Saying the sounds correctly with your child is extremely important The way we say sound may well be different from when we were at school We say the shortest form of the sounds http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IwJx1NSineE 1.45

8. Blending Recognising the letter sounds in a written word, for example c-u-p

9. Segmenting ‘Chopping Up’ the word to spell it out The opposite of blending For example…..

10. Tricky Words Words that are not phonically de-codable and we call these tricky words. Children have to know these by sight. e.g. was, the, I…

11. Phonics lessons These are taught as a discrete session daily for about 30 minutes. We teach phonics in Reception, Year 1 and Year 2 in this way. Phonic skills are incorporated across the curriculum and across all year groups. Useful resources to buy are Jolly phonics, Alpha blocks and there are a list of links on the website.

12. Lesson format Our phonics lessons follow the same format: Revise: The children will revise previous learning. Teach: New phonemes or high frequency or tricky words will be taught. Practice: The children will practise the new learning by reading and/or writing the words. Apply: The children will apply their new learning by reading or writing sentences.

13. Phonic learning is fun! The children learn and practise their phonemes in lots of fun ways: Sound talking and rhyming. Playing games – table games or interactive games on the computer. Using phoneme frames, “sound buttons” and whiteboards to spell words. Sorting phonemes. Making words with phonemes. Being phoneme “detectives”. Reading and writing sentences. Silly sentences are great fun!

14. How can you help? Sing an alphabet song together Play ‘I spy’ Continue to play with magnetic letters, using some two-grapheme (letter) combinations, eg: r-ai-n = rain blending for reading rain = r-ai-n segmenting for spelling Praise your child for trying out words Look at tricky words Look for phonic games in shops (Early Learning Centre) and online Play pairs with words and pictures

15. REMEMBER: Phonics is not the only thing needed to become a fluent reader. Please continue to read with your child each night and encourage them to: Sound out Re-read to check it makes sense. Use pictures for clues. Ask questions about the book. And most importantly ENJOY READING!