1. Phonics workshop

2. What is phonics? Phonics is….. The skills of segmentation
and blending
Knowledge of the
alphabetic code
Children must be taught:
grapheme/phoneme (letter/sound) correspondences (the alphabetic principle) in a clearly defined, incremental sequence
to apply the highly important skills of blending(sythesising) phonemes in order, all through a word to read it;
to apply the skills of segmenting words into their constituent phonemes to spell;
That blending and segmenting are reversible processes.
(Wray and Medwell 2008:14)
Phonics today includes the development of phonological awareness, the knowledge of sound-symbol correspondences, knowledge of the alphabet and names of letters, the skills of blending and segmenting and, rather strangely, sight knowledge of common irregular words and their spellings. Also, morphemic content at later stages e.g –ed patterns. (Wray and Medwell 2008: 15)

3. Consonant phonemes
/b/ baby /m/ man /y/ yes /d/ dog /n/ nut /z/ zebra /f/ field /p/ paper /w/ was /g/ game /r/ wrong /l/ lamb /h/ hat /s/ sun /ng/ ring /j/ judge /t/ tap /zh/treasure /k/ cook /v/van /ch/ chip /sh/ ship /th/ thin/then
Approximately ½ phonemes are consonants and ½ are vowels (interesting as there are only 5 vowels!)
Go through pronunciation of all. Do not over-pronounce ‘ssss’ not ‘suh’ etc. Adding an ‘uh’ sound makes it more difficult for children to blend the phonemes to read
Following phoneme count activity, return to this slide to deal with difficulties:
e.g. consonant clusters/adjacent consonants*, digraphs, trigraphs, double letters as consonant digraphs
‘x’ as 2 phonemes (C+S e.g. box)
‘qu’ always together (C+W)
y = consonant + vowel
‘c’ and ‘g’ soft (cymbal, bicycle, recent gym, giraffe, ginger) and hard (camera, candle, camel gate goat grill)
phonemes are represented in different ways e.g. /j/ j or g in ‘magic’ and ‘judge’ and ‘giraffe; dge in ‘judge’
* May come across different terms for adjacent consonants e.g. consonant clusters/blends/consecutive consonants!
EAL focus: different language use different sets of phonemes – possible difficulties in hearing /saying some phonemes (r/l discrimination for Japanese speakers)

4. Vowel phonemes /a/ cat /ie/ tie /er/sister
/e/ peg /oe/ road /ow/ shout
/i/ pig /ue/ moon /oi/ coin
/o/ log /oo/ look /air/ fare
/u/ plug /ar/ cart /ear/ sheer
/ae/ pain /ur/ first /ure/ tour
/ee/ feet /au/ torn
Vowel phonemes more difficult to hear. Almost all of them have 2 or more representations.
Some vowels are unstressed ‘schwa’ e.g. rota, picture – makes spelling (segmentation) difficult.

5. Your phonics subject knowledge – what do you need?
To know the terminology and use it accurately
To be able to hear all the phonemes in words (segment)
To understand the relationship between letters and sounds (GPCs / PGCs)
To recognise that this is a key aspect of subject knowledge for all primary school teachers