What is phonics? Phonics is recommended as the first strategy that children should be taught in helping them learn to read. It runs alongside other teaching methods such as Guided Reading and Shared Reading to help children develop all the other vital reading skills and hopefully give them a real love of reading. Words are made up from small units of sound called phonemes. Phonics teaches children to be able to listen carefully and identify the phonemes that make up each word. This helps children to learn to read words and to spell words.

Phoneme- a phoneme is the smallest unit of sound in a word. Terminology Phoneme- a phoneme is the smallest unit of sound in a word. Grapheme- a letter or sequence of letters that represents a phoneme. 1 2 3 c a t b ir d f i sh kn igh These words each have three phonemes (separate sounds). Each of these phonemes is represented by a grapheme. A grapheme may consist of on, two, three or four letters. Digraph- a diagraph is a two- letter grapheme where two letters represent one sound such as ‘ea’ in seat and ‘sh’ in ship.

Muh+ ah+ tuh= muhahtuh M+a+t= mat It’s important to pronounce each phoneme the correct way otherwise it makes it harder for children to hear the sounds in the word. For example: Muh+ ah+ tuh= muhahtuh If you use the phoneme it is easier for children to sound talk the phonemes and blend them to read the word. M+a+t= mat Lets listen and join in with the phonemes

Let’s sound talk and blend these words. cat mum dad bag map moon light rocket

First steps for children- model listening and speaking. Encourage talking- this helps children to develop language and explore new language. Allow children time to think about what has been said, gather their thoughts and construct their replies. Model good listening- show your child how to make good eye contact with the person speaking, ask questions, repeat back to confirm, comment on what has been said and give lots of opportunities for communication. Good models of spoken English- expand vocabulary, structure sentences, speak with confidence and clearly, sustain dialogue. We use the Letters and Sounds programme to teach high quality systematic phonics teaching. This comprises of six structured phases.

Phase 1: General sound discriminations- environmental sounds e.g. Listening walks, instrumental and body percussion. Rhythm and rhyme e.g. Nursery rhymes Alliteration Voice sounds Oral blending and segmenting Phase 2 Begins the introduction of grapheme- phoneme correspondences (GPCs). Decoding for reading and encoding for spelling are taught as reversible processes. As soon as the first few correspondences have been learned, children are taught to blend and segment with them. Blending means merging the individual phonemes together into whole words; segmenting is the reverse process of splitting up whole spoken words into individual phonemes. Phase 3 Completes the teaching of the alphabet, and children move on to sounds represented by more than one letter.