1. Phonics Parents Meeting
Monday 25th January at 2p.m.

2. Mrs Jankowska Nursery Teacher
Who we are….
Mrs Jankowska Nursery Teacher
Miss Ranson
Reception Teacher
Miss Andrews
Year 1Teacher

3. What is phonics?
A method of teaching children to read by matching sounds with letters.
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 vital reading skills and hopefully give them a real love of reading.

4. Vocabulary your child might use
Segmenting and blending or chopping up
Phoneme
Grapheme
Digraph
Trigraph
Split digraph
Sound buttons

5. How do we teach Phonics at St Francis?
Letters and Sounds
Divided into 6 phases, each phases builds on the skills and knowledge of previous learning.
Lesson format:
Revise
Teach
Practise
Apply

6. How do we teach Phonics at St Francis?
Jolly phonics
Letters and sounds
Abacus website
Phonics Play website

7. What does Phonics consist 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.

8. Phoneme A phoneme is the smallest unit of sound in a word.
For example:
Cat – has three phonemes
Frog – has four phonemes
How many does the word crab have?

9. Grapheme A grapheme means the letters that represent the phoneme.
Children need to practise recognising the grapheme and saying the phoneme it represents
A grapheme can be 1 letter, 2 letters or more!

10. Phoneme - Grapheme Phoneme is what you hear Grapheme is what you see
A word always has the same number of graphemes and phonemes!

11. The 44 phonemes

12. Here is where it gets tricky…
Phonemes represent graphemes
Graphemes can consist of 1,2 or more letters
A phoneme can be represented (spelt) in more than one way:
cat, king, choir
The same grapheme may represent more than one phoneme
she, shed

13. Segmenting and blending
This is the way we teach the children to sound out their words to enable them to read them.
For example:
Segmenting the word cat would be c – a – t
Then blend them back together to say cat
Children often use their hands to separate the sounds and clap to blend them back together, if you could also encourage this at home.

14. Digraph
Once the children recognise the single phonemes we start with digraphs
Digraphs are 2 letters that make 1 sound ng ss ch ai oa
Just to name a couple, there are many more..

15. Trigraph Next we look at trigraphs
A trigraph means 3 letters that make 1 sound
igh
dge
ear
air
Just to name a couple, there are more..

16. Segmenting Activity 
Can you say how many phonemes are each of these words:
Shelf
Dress
Light
String
Chair

17. The answers… Shelf – 4 phonemes – sh – e – l – f
Dress – 4 phonemes – d – r – e – ss
Light – 3 phoemes – l – igh – t
String - 5 phonemes – s – t – r – i – ng
Chair – 2 phonemes – ch - air

18. Tricky words
With every rule there are always exceptions these are tricky words. Words that are not phonically decodable:
Was I
The Do
Said
Have
Just to name a couple, there are many more..

19. Sound buttons tail sail
These are the lines and dots we teach the children to write underneath the words to help them to identify the different sounds in their words.
tail
sail

20. Split Digraph cake home
A split digraph is vowel sound that a been split. A magic ‘e’.
cake
home

21. Phonics Screening Test in Year 1
Week commencing the 13th June
Children are given 40 words to read
20 real words
20 alien words
The pass mark in previous years has been 32.
If the children fail the test in Year 1 they will retake it in Year 2

22. How you can help at home Play “I spy” Use websites for phonic games
Encourage segmenting and blending
Look at tricky words with your child