Tuesday 20 th September 2016

In school, we follow the Letters and Sounds programme. Letters and Sounds is a phonics resource published by the Department for Education and Skills which consists of six phases. Jolly Phonics is also used alongside this programme.

Phoneme – The smallest unit of sound. There are approximately 44 phonemes in English. Phonemes can be put together to make words. Graphemes – A way of writing down a phoneme. Graphemes can be made up from 1 letter, 2 letters, 3 letters or 4 letters. Segmenting and blending – See further slides. Digraph – A grapheme containing two letters that makes just one sound (phoneme) i.e. th, sh, oo Trigraph – A grapheme containing three letters that makes just one sound (phoneme) i.e. igh, air Split digraph – See Phase 5 slide. Abbreviations T ERMINOLOGY

P HASE 1 P RE - SCHOOL /R ECEPTION There are 7 aspects with 3 strands. A1 – Environmental A2 – Instrumental sounds A3 – Body Percussion A4 – Rhythm and rhyme A5 – Alliteration A6 – Voice sounds A7 – Oral blending and segmenting.

P HASE 2 R ECEPTION Set 1: s, a, t, p Set 2: i, n, m, d Set 3: g, o, c, k Set 4: ck, e, u, r Set 5: h, b, f, ff, l, ll, ss Tricky words: I, to, no, go, the

P HASE 3 R ECEPTION 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

P HASE 4 Y EAR 1 This phase consolidates all the children have learnt in the previous phases.

P HASE 5 Y EAR 1 The purpose of this phase is for children to broaden their knowledge of graphemes and phonemes for use in reading and spelling. Children will learn new graphemes and alternative pronunciations for these and graphemes they already know, such as ‘i’ in fin and find or ‘o’ as in hot, cold. They will be taught split digraphs such as what needs to be added to ‘tie’ to make ‘time’ i_e

P HASE 6 Y EAR 2 The focus is on learning spelling rules for suffixes. -s -es -ing -ed -er -est -y -en -ful -ly -ment -ness

Y EAR 1 P HONICS T EST

S EGMENTING Breaking down words for spelling. cat

S EGMENTING queen

B LENDING Building words from phonemes to read. c a t

B LENDING qu ee n

W HAT DOES A P HONICS LESSON LOOK LIKE ? Revisit/reviewFlashcards to practice phonemes learnt so far. TeachTeach new phoneme air PracticeBuried treasure Air, zair, fair, hair, lair, pair, vair, sair, thair ApplyRead captions: The goat had a long beard. The quack was right in his ear.

R ESOURCES flash/alphabet-eng/alphabet.htm