Phonics for Families Care, Imagine, Believe, Strive, Achieve Melbourne Primary School

So what is ‘Phonics?’ Phonics is the skill of hearing the sounds of a letter and recognising the letter shapes that match the sounds. Children need to be able to hear, see and say these, this takes lots of practise!

Letters & Sounds At Melbourne School we use the Letters and Sounds programme and support this using the Jolly Phonics actions and songs.

We build on the basic skills that are started at home Most children have begun to learn about rhyme, rhythm and repetition through stories and nursery rhymes. They are developing their listening skills and beginning to understand how books work through the sharing of books.

Daily Phonics Session Review - practise previously learned letters Teach - new grapheme/phoneme correspondence - blending and segmenting - tricky words Practise - new phoneme/grapheme correspondences - the skills of blending and segmenting Apply - read or write a caption

Phonics Phase 1 Tuning children into sounds Talking about sounds Playing listening games Singing songs and rhymes All these things will help to build up connections in the brain, an enjoyment of language and confidence to try things out. It is a crucial phase that paves the way for phonics teaching to begin. The skills the children learn in Phase 1 support their learning throughout all the other Phases.

What this looks like in school: Letters and Sound Phase 1 : 7 aspects Environmental sounds Instrumental sounds Body percussion Rhythm and rhyme Alliteration Voice sounds Oral blending and segmenting

Then where to next? When a child has: The ability to distinguish between speech sounds. Begun to be able to blend and segment words orally.

Phase 2 At Phase 2 we start to teach children the graphemes (letters) and phonemes (sounds).

Phonemes A phoneme is the smallest unit of sound in a word. There are 44 phonemes that we teach. Once the children have learnt some single letters, we then move onto digraphs and trigraphs. DIGRAPHS – 2 letters that make 1 sound ll ss zz oa ai TRIGRAPHS – 3 letters that make 1 sound igh dge It is very important that we use the correct vocabulary and the correct pronunciation.

The 44 letter sounds https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-ksblMiliA8

Graphemes Sounds (phonemes) are represented by letters (graphemes). More than one letter can represent a phoneme e.g. m ai igh We practise writing these graphemes using print, focusing on their formation, where we start each grapheme and if they have an ascender or descender.

Children need lots of practise recognising the grapheme and saying the phoneme that it represents and forming the graphemes properly!

Blending Is recognising the phoneme 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 Is the opposite to blending, this time we are ‘Breaking Up’ a word to spell it out. We need to hear individual phonemes within a word and choose a letter or letter combination (e.g. – sh) to represent the phoneme. e.g. ‘crash’ has 4 phonemes c-r-a-sh.

We use sound buttons to help us blend and segment words fin bridge catch daylight

Segment and Blend these words… drep blom gris Nonsense games like this help to build up skills – and are fun!

Phase 3 The aim of phase 3 is: To teach another 25 graphemes – most of them comprising two letters (e.g. oa). To learn letter names. To continue to practise blending and segmentation. Apply knowledge of blending and segmenting to reading and spelling simple two-syllable words and captions. To read some more ‘tricky’ words and begin to learn to spell some of these words.

Phase 4 There is no new learning of phonemes. The aim of phase 4 is: To consolidate children’s knowledge; this is a short phase with a duration of 4-6 weeks. Increase the speed of recognition of graphemes and whole word. Increase the use of letter names.

Phase 5 The aim of phase 5 is: To be able to spell most of the 100 decodable words To read and spell phonically decodable two-syllable and three-syllable words To read and spell a number of 'tricky' words. Children are introduced to new graphemes and begin to explore alternative pronunciations. Children are encouraged to read words in favour of continuing to sound-talk and blend them. However, they continue to use overt or silent phonics for words that are unfamiliar.

Alternate pronunciation The same grapheme (spelling) can also represent more than one phoneme (sound)! We begin by teaching one way to write a grapheme. mean deaf crown flown field tried

Phase 6 Children entering phase six know most of the common grapheme-phoneme correspondences. Many children can read longer and less familiar texts independently and with increasing fluency. Children’s spelling is phonetically accurate, although it may still be a little unconventional at times.

Now you have the knowledge…. Model good listening skills. Help children to tune into sounds- play lots of sound and listening games with your child. Encourage them to make sounds themselves. Give children time to respond. Read as much as possible to and with your child. Sing nursery rhymes. Point out rhyme in books, ask you child if they can think of another word in the rhyming string. Encourage and praise – get them to have a ‘good guess’. Observe their successes and difficulties – look, listen and note! Please speak to one of our team if you want to know more.