Bedfont Primary School Introduction to Phonics

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 ‘Letters and Sounds’ as our teaching resource.

Phonics consists of: Identifying sounds in spoken words Recognising the common spellings of each phoneme. Blending phonemes into words for reading. Segmenting words into phonemes for spelling. skills for reading and spelling knowledge of the alphabet +

Phonic terms your child will learn at school Phonemes: The smallest units of sound that are found within a word. c-a-t d-o-g r-u-n t-o-p Grapheme: The spelling of the sound. bat mud net Digraph: Two letters that make one sound when read. oi ss sh oa ai ch th Trigraphs: Three letters that make one sound igh ear air

Phonic terms your child will learn at school CVC: Stands for consonant, vowel, consonant. Blending : Putting the sounds together to read a word. Segmenting is breaking up a word into its sounds. Tricky words: Words that cannot easily be decoded e.g. was, the, I, he

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’ chip sound buttons

Segmenting ‘Chopping up’ the word to spell it out The opposite of blending Identifying the individual sounds in a spoken word (e.g. h-i-m, s-t-or-k) and writing down letters for each sound (phoneme) to form the words f i sh

Phonics check Letters and Sounds is divided into six phases, with each phase building on the skills and knowledge of previous learning. In June Year 1 children will have a phonics check. The focus of the check is to see which sounds the children know and therefore the children will be asked to read made up ‘nonsense’ words and real words.

What the phonics screening check will look like?

What will happen during the check? There is no time limit for the check. The children can take as long as they like but it usually takes most children no longer than 10 minutes to complete. Parents will be informed of their child’s score with their end of year report.