1. Phonic Fun

2. What is Phonics? Phonics is recommended as the first strategy that children should be taught in helping them learn to read. 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. When phonemes are written down they are called graphemes.

3. Phonic Phases Phonics is taught across schools in phases Phase 1 – Starts in Nursery and continues through all of the other phases. The aim of this phase is to develop children’s speaking and listening skills as preparation for learning to read with phonics. Parents can play a vital role in helping their children develop these skills, by encouraging their children to listen carefully and talk about what they hear, see and do. Sharing stories and singing nursery rhymes is a good start point.

4. Phases Two to Four – During Phase Two to Four, children learn: How to represent each of the sounds by a letter or sequence of letters. How to blend sounds together for reading and how to segment (split) words for spelling. Letter names How to read and spell some high frequency ‘tricky’ words containing sounds not yet learnt (e.g. they, my, her, you). Phase Five - This phase is difficult because the English language is complex. Some sounds have alternative spellings for example “ai” can also be written as “ay” Children learn new ways of representing the sounds and practise blending for reading and segmenting for spelling. Phase Six - During this phase, children become fluent readers and increasingly accurate spellers.

5. Some Definitions Oral blending Hearing a series of spoken sounds and merging them together to make a spoken word – no text is used. For example, when a grown up says ‘b-u-s’, the children say ‘bus’. This skill is usually taught before blending and reading printed words. Blending Recognising the letter sounds in a written word, for example c-u-p, and merging or synthesising them in the order in which they are written to pronounce the word ‘cup’.

6. Segmenting Identifying the individual sounds in a spoken word (e.g. h-i-m) and writing down or manipulating letters for each sound to form the word ‘him’. In simple terms segmenting is spelling and blending is reading.

7. A digraph is two letters making one sound sh ch th ll ck ss ff A trigraph is three letters making one sound igh tch air A graph is a single letter making a single sound s a t p i n A consonant blend or cluster is different to a digraph. The letters don’t make a different sound they are just squished up together sl tr gr bl

8. CVC words A cvc word is made up of a consonant, a vowel and a consonant e.g cat, dog, big, tin They are where we begin reading. Some words that are commonly mistaken for cvc words are bow car day for

9. Tricky words Tricky words are words that cannot be ‘sounded-out’ but need to be learned by heart. They don’t fit into the usual spelling patterns. Examples of these are: the, to, no, go, I. At the end of Year 1 all children have to take a phonics test to assess their ability to read these sounds.

10. Jolly Phonics Jolly Phonics gives each sound an action so that children can remember it more easily.

11. Lets have some Phonic Fun! 1 – Messy opportunities. These are important as they help children remember something that could be boring. The more senses you use the better the link in the brain. (shaving foam, slime, glitter) 2 – Outdoor Phonics. A great way of having fun on a large scale that will probably appeal to boys and make sure they are engaged in their learning. (Water bottle squirters, phonic hunt) 3– Malleable and fine motor (Playdough cutters, finger painting, cut and stick word building) Phonics doesn’t have to be boring you can use…