1. Understanding and teaching phonics
Breaking the code
Welcome and introduction.
Introduce yourselves and your role in the school. You may need to talk a little about the project, depending on how well briefed the phonics champions are.
Explain that these materials have been produced centrally to ensure that everyone gets the same training, but that you will make sure everyone understands how they might relate to their schools.

2. Objectives for session
Colleagues will
understand what is meant by phonics and why it is important as the way in to reading
explore what makes good phonics teaching and some “non-negotiables”
feel confident to train others in these aspects
It’s important to stress how current thinking clearly identifies phonics as the most effective, time-efficient way in to reading – not the only way, and certainly there’s a lot more to reading than phonics as we shall see in later slides, but:
The National Curriculum, which is statutory in LA-run schools (and followed in most non-LA schools anyway) is very clear about the importance of teaching phonics
This is a government-funded project, with the specific aim of improving phonics teaching and learning
There is abundant evidence (quite a lot of which is quoted in the ppt) as to why phonics works as the way into reading
The materials are also very clear about what phonics is actually for, and the importance of situating phonics teaching within a broad, deep, rich language curriculum!
So don’t get side-tracked into discussing whether other methods are better!
There will be a further, very practical session on what phonics teaching should look like in schools.
As regards the last point, make sure you ask any questions you need to, and when delivering the training yourselves, make sure phonics champions know that there’s no such thing as a silly question!

3. Agenda What’s phonics for? What do we mean by phonics?
Why phonics works
Making it work in school
Making it work in the classroom
Phonics into reading and writing
Some non-negotiables
Plenary
Coffee and lunch at appropriate times!
You need to cover all of these areas.

4. The purpose of phonics... ...is to move from /c/ /a/ /t/ to
This slide has animations on!
I believe that teaching children to read and supporting them in becoming readers who read for pleasure are the most important things we do in primary school.
You might like to debate this briefly, and look at some of the abundant evidence on the benefits of reading for pleasure.
Feel free to substitute favourite books of your own!

5. What do we mean by phonics?
English operates on an alphabetic system; that is, 26 symbols (the letters of the alphabet) represent approximately 44 sounds, singly and in combination.
We can learn to recognise these symbols, singly and in combination, and assign sounds to them in order to read (grapheme-phoneme correspondence)
We can learn to segment words into sounds and identify the correct symbols in order to spell (phoneme-grapheme correspondence)
Basic phonic facts – “phonics” is a bit vague, so let’s start by being clear what we mean, on this and the next slide.
44 sounds is somewhere in the middle – some regional accents have fewer (some don’t distinguish between /f/ and /th/ for example) and some have slightly more.
Reading is of course more than grapheme-phoneme correspondence even when we’re discussing decoding, as we’ll see.
Blending for reading and segmenting for spelling are often described as the same operation reversed, but in fact PGC is much harder as there are not so many clues and a lot more choices!

6. What do we mean by phonics? (2)
No particular published scheme is indicated, but the Rose Review, building on key research, recommended that “systematic phonics teaching should conform to the major principles implemented in what has become known as ‘synthetic’ phonics” and this seems to have become established as the norm; the core criteria for phonics schemes published by the government in 2010 describes “systematic synthetic phonics.” and phonics teaching is statutory in the National Curriculum
The other main approach to teaching phonics is “analytic” phonics.
Synthetic phonics starts by giving the children the GPCs and showing them how to blend them , or “synthesise” them, to make words. Of course, this means they have to know the words to start with, hence the rich language curriculum in phase 1 of most synthetic phonics schemes.
Analytic phonics, broadly, starts with the words and demonstrates how to analyse them. So you might start with say, “cat” and look at onset - /c/ - and rime “at”. You might then look at rhyming words or other words that start with /c/. It’s a bit hit and miss – the advantage of synthetic phonics is that it’s systematic, if you are faithful to a particular scheme.
Most schemes do have elements of analytic phonics, once children start mastering digraphs and trigraphs.

7. Why phonics? Looking at the evidence
Going to look at why phonics works. Why should it be the most effective way in to reading and writing.

8. Why phonics? Findings from research
Systematic phonics programs significantly more effective than non-systematic or no phonics programs.
Systematic phonics programs significantly more effective when given in kindergarten or first grade
Systematic phonics programs led to better reading comprehension in younger children
National Reading Panel 2000
All the references (I hope) are in the “references” handout.
The NRP was a very influential USA meta-study.

9. Why phonics? Findings from research (2)
Systematic phonics instruction within a broad literacy curriculum was found to have a statistically significant positive effect on reading accuracy.
There was no statistically significant difference between the effectiveness of systematic phonics instruction for reading accuracy for normally-developing children and for children at risk of reading failure.
Torgerson, Brooks and Hall, 2006
Torgerson, Brooks and Hall is another meta-study, very influential in the Rose Review and hence the 2014 NC.
Note a couple of key points – “within a broad reading curriculum” and the fact that it worked for children at risk of reading failure.
You can find a summary online, or I can probably you the whole thing if you want it.

10. This is because...
To be recognised speedily on sight, words have to be in the reader’s “mental lexicon” – you have to know the word before you can read it.
Getting a word into the mental lexicon requires a consistent mnemonic method; you can’t memorise the look of every word.
Studies of young readers who haven’t acquired knowledge of the alphabet show that they attend to irrelevant and unhelpful features to recall words, which will not work consistently.
A summary of some of the research.
Readers decode using both ‘lexical’ and ‘non-lexical’ routes.
The idea of the ”mental lexicon” is important. Basically it proposes that you can only read a word correctly if it’s one you already know (though the degree of knowledge may differ). Take this example: if I give you the phonemes /p/ /i/ /n/ /t/, what do they say if you blend them?
To be in your mental lexicon, words have to be seen and heard so you need some reliable way of linking the way they look with the way they sound. But children who have not acquired grapheme-phoneme correspondences use visual cues, which are not necessarily letters:
Masonheimer, Drum and Ehri, 1984
The golden arches of Macdonalds
Seymour and Elder, 1986
The two sticks in ‘ball’
Stuart, 1986
The dot in ‘television’
Gough, 1993
The thumbprint on the flashcard
“Mature readers read sight words by remembering how the configuration of letters in the spellings of individual words symbolizes sounds or phonemes in their pronunciations” (Ehri, 1999)
‘pre-alphabetic readers adopt a visual cue approach by default because they lack the knowledge or ability to use letter names or sounds to form alphabetic connections…’ so
‘the lack of an alphabetic mnemonic system makes it difficult for children to learn to read words by memory’ (Ehri 2005)

11. Findings from research (3)
Learning to recognise sounds in words (phonemes) and the letters that make them helps fix orthographic knowledge in the brain. (Once you know a particular grapheme-phoneme correspondence you recognise it in other words; you have to pay less and less attention to it until it becomes an automatic response.)
Share, 1995 (and more recently); Stuart, 2006a, 2006b; Savage and Stuart, 2006; Ehri 1999
This is sometimes known as the “self-teaching” hypothesis – i.e. practice makes perfect! The more often you do something, the better you get at it, and the more you understand the principles, which results in you being able to transfer skills to other situations.

12. In other words...
the better you get at recognising letters and letter patterns and the sounds the letters make
the bigger your mental lexicon gets
so you recognise more words more quickly (because the lexical and non-lexical routes are both working efficiently)
the more words you know, the better you are at reading.
To summarise.

13. The importance of early decoding success in reading
The earlier children become fluent decoders, the more time and cognitive space they have to develop
reading stamina
a competent working memory
a wide vocabulary
comprehension skills
and the more likely they are to read for pleasure.
The benefits of developing automaticity early.

14. The importance of phonics
89% of those children reaching the expected phonics standard in Y1 reached the expected standard in reading in Y2
31% were working at a greater depth within the expected standard
Of those who reached the phonics standard only in Y2, only 36% were working at the expected standard in reading, and 2% working at greater depth. 54% were working towards the expected standard in reading.
And we have some more possible evidence in the form of the Screening Test. Important to understand that these statistics don’t necessarily demonstrate cause and effect; children who are good at phonics, as manifested in the test, may also be good at reading - perhaps the two things share a cause, rather than the good phonics being the cause of the good reading. However, it’s interesting that there is a correlation between the figures.
Not sure what happened to the remaining 10%!

15. Plenary Do you feel confident with the content of the training so far?
Do you feel confident to deliver it back in school?
Any questions? Want to go back to anything?
Adapt this slide so it applies to you and the phonics champions/TAs.

16. Making it work in school
Looking at some things that have to be in place to make it work.
Nothing significant about the picture!

17. EEF Guidance Report – Improving Literacy in KS1
Produced to support Education Endowment Foundation’s North East Primary Literacy Campaign
Eight practical evidence-based recommendations ‘representing “lever points” that schools can use to make a significant difference to pupils’ learning’
Based on international research
Could be used to audit and improve current literacy provision
Look at EEF HO pp6-7. Full report available.
Look particularly at element 3, where the evidence was very extensive.
Which of the other elements do you think are especially important in schools?
You could ask PCs which they think are particularly important to develop in their own schools.

18. “Effectively implement a systematic phonics programme”
Effective pedagogy
Monitor progress
Engaging lessons developing persistence and perseverance
All staff trained
Faithfulness to the programme
This is element 3 from the EEF report
Could form the basis for an audit of current practice in schools. Which points would be most important?
What are the implications? Discuss. Going to look in more detail in following slides.

19. Characteristics of successful schools
These schools shared
a very rigorous and sequential approach to developing speaking and listening and teaching reading, writing and spelling through systematic phonics.
applied with a high degree of consistency and sustained.
planned structure, fast pace, praise and reinforcement, perceptive responses, active participation by all children and evidence of progress.
effective teachers highly trained to instil the principles of phonics
Reading by six; how the best schools do it (Ofsted 2010)
Further evidence, if needed.

20. In many schools
EYFS use a different programme from that used in KS1
There are staff teaching phonics who have no experience of the programme – or sufficient subject knowledge about phonics
Staff not directly involved in teaching phonics do not know/understand how it is taught
There is no-one with sufficient authority and knowledge about phonics to pull it all together
In “Reading by six” there are examples of schools who do mix and match programmes – but in these schools there is someone, usually in a position of authority, who is knowledgeable and enthusiastic about phonics and who plans the school’s own programme carefully.

21. High fidelity! consistently systematically and so that
Fidelity to the chosen programme is vital to ensure that children are taught
consistently
systematically
and so that
everyone has the same expectations of what children should be achieving
and also
to ensure sensible use of resources and materials
This should be obvious – not all schemes use the same progression, so it’s possible to miss phonemes out or teach them repeatedly; some schemes are more reliant on learning in a particular way, so that children then find it difficult to adapt; different schemes may demand that you buy expensive back-up resources which then don’t work with another scheme; staff can develop expertise with one scheme and then be reluctant to change if they change year group... Don’t mess around with different schemes in different year groups, or worse still, different classes!

22. Some implications
All staff involved in teaching phonics need training in
how the programme chosen by the school works
using the programme faithfully
how to teach it effectively, ensuring that all children are making progress and not allowing misconceptions to pass unchallenged
the school’s “non-negotiables”
Each of these points will be broken down in turn on following slides.

23. Staff training Consider cost and time implications
keeping up with staffing changes
who needs to take responsibility?
all staff, including TAs and KS2
importance of understanding theory in order to get the practicalities right
training in pedagogy as well as programme
ensuring basic subject knowledge
Discuss.
There are considerable cost and time implications for training (especially in the case of some programmes), but it’s vital. Many schools don’t do well because staff changes mean that staff are teaching a phonics programme they aren’t familiar with. In many cases, this means that staff will teach a programme they do know, which leads to inconsistency., as in previous slide. Phonics training needs to be on the action plan at least every year, if there are staff changes; someone with expertise needs to be responsible for training new staff, including TAs in the meantime (mustn’t just be left to a parallel teacher or TA).

24. A rich language curriculum
Being exposed to a rich language curriculum (not just books – opportunities for speaking and listening, playing with words) right from the start is a sine qua non of becoming a reader.
phonemic awareness
mental lexicon
vocabulary
knowledge and experience of the world
comprehension
ENJOYMENT
1.Phonemic awareness – when we have some children coming in barely aware of individual words, training them to hear the separate sounds in words is vital. Children also often have undiagnosed hearing difficulties, and even a minor hearing loss can impact negatively on learning phonics and hence reading. Consider the worth of books such as Each Peach...
2.Mental lexicon –– given how this works, it’s important that children can see and hear books being read aloud as often as possible.
3.Vocab – more than having words in mental lexicon; vocab is about having a degree of understanding, ranging from “heard it before” to “know it and can use it appropriately”. (More of this on a later slide)
4. Learning words brings general knowledge, without which skills like inference are impossible. Each word learned brings some context – the more you learn, the more you know. For example, in a sentence like, “They went to the library, where there were lots of books to borrow”, if you know “books” and “borrow”, you’ll have some idea of “library”.
5. It seems clear that it’s helpful to start thinking about teaching children comprehension skills right from the start, as they’re as much a part of reading as decoding. Extensive evidence in the EEF report. Consider how good picture books can support you in this – for example, does Rosie (in Rosie’s Walk) know the fox is following her...
6. Our ultimate aim. I’m not interested in producing children who can read but don’t!
The next slide is the Simple View of Reading – worth revisiting at this stage as a reminder of the importance of language comprehension in reading, and therefore of a rich language curriculum.

25. The Simple View of Reading
Reminder of the SVR. The interdependence of the two axes. Not about developing Word Recognition then , moving to Language Comprehension. The LC axis develops lifelong, whereas the WR axis is time-limited.
Unpick ‘language comprehension’. It contributes to reading comprehension but is not the same as reading comprehension, which is the result of the interplay of the two axes.
Quote from ‘Learning to read and learning to comprehend’ (Angell and Nation, 2006): “….., the task of learning to comprehend text can be described in large part quite simply as learning to understand writing as well as one understands spoken language (Perfetti et al., 2005). Two conclusions follow from this premise. First, reading comprehension is served by spoken language comprehension and, ultimately, an individual’s spoken language comprehension limits how much he or she can understand written language.”

26. A rich language curriculum
What should be in place?
“a very rigorous and sequential approach to developing speaking and listening”
frequent and regular reading aloud from a range of texts, including poetry and non-fiction
story-telling
opportunities for children to learn stories and poems by heart
Top point is from Reading by Six.
What are the implications?
Do children have experiences worth speaking and listening about?
Reading aloud generally happens in EY – but what does it look like in Y1 and 2? What’s the range of texts, particularly poetry? Poetry is very neglected throughout the school – you could suggest some poems or anthologies to get started, such as The Puffin Book of Fantastic First Poems – and don’t forget nursery rhymes.
Why story-telling as opposed to reading?
The benefits of learning by heart? (Trains the memory as well as giving you a wealth of templates to draw on.)

27. A rich language curriculum
Is the development of spoken language and listening skills specifically referenced in long- and short-term plans?
Are staff providing experiences rich in language development opportunities and making the most of them?
Have EYFS and KS1 staff liaised to ensure that children keep meeting new stories and texts as well as revisiting well-known ones?
How is the development of reading comprehension supported alongside decoding skills?
These might be areas you could look at between now and the next lot of training. You might think of some others to do with the language curriculum. It’s particularly important to get this bit right, as nothing else will really work without it!

28. The importance of learning vocabulary
A child’s ability to understand rests on what they know about words.
Having a low vocabulary can trap children in a vicious circle, since children who cannot read more advanced texts miss out on opportunities to extend their vocabulary.
Fisher and Blachnowicz, 2005
but many children will come to school either with a very low vocabulary, or without the possibility of learning new words at home
so direct robust vocabulary teaching is vital
There is growing evidence, for example in the NRP report, that understanding individual words is vital to comprehension. Take the following sentences, for example:
“She certainly can dance,” thought Jane.
“She certainly can dance,” thought Jane, grudgingly.
That one additional word makes all the difference to our understanding of the sentence.
Key Stage 2 colleagues will tell us how much difference a good vocab makes to attainment in the test – and leaving tests aside, it should be obvious what advantages understanding and having a choice of words will give you.
A word of warning – this isn’t about using “WOW” words. A word is only a good word to use if it’s in the right place!

29. Direct robust vocabulary teaching in EYFS and KS1
For example
Word of the day
A “magpie” board
The thesaurus game
Instant drama
Target words in texts
Word bingo
Rewards for using new words
It’s not hard – children are hard-wired for language!
Doesn’t have to be hard, and should be fun. Will talk through some or all of these ideas.

30. Planning for phonics in school
Suggestions
Phonics sessions at the same time, to make best use of teachers and TAs and facilitate monitoring
System to support teachers in remembering what stage children are at, in order to facilitate application
Second point – it may be that in larger schools, children go to different groups outside the class. One school I worked in gave each group different coloured stickers, so the teacher could immediately recognise, without having to remember, which group each child was in, and knowing this would be able to ask appropriate questions to facilitate application of the skills they were learning – e.g .”Here’s one for red group (phase 3) – if I want to write “shop” which two letters do I need to start with?”

31. Phonics into reading
Children need to be given a chance to practise phonic knowledge as soon as possible after the phonics session.
Consider
book choice
phonetically decodable books
“real” books - which can support both phonic knowledge and comprehension skills
strategies for teaching reading
Just to be clear, pdbs are books matched to the phases which use the graphemes already learned. Since some schemes differ slightly in the order in which the teach GPCs not all pdbs are interchangeable. It seems obvious that it’s a good thing to have books which will allow children to apply and practise what they’ve learned, and my guidance would be that the majority of books children use for reading practice – NOT the majority of books they encounter! – should be pdbs. Consult “Which book and Why?” from the IoE for bands and teaching ideas. Will consider this more on next slide.
Strategies for teaching reading – consider how this might be done. Guided reading, even with beginning readers, can be, if well done, both time-efficient and effective. Apart from not having to say the same thing 6 times, you say it once to six children, and each child’s successes and errors can be used as teaching points. Again WBaW? is a very useful resource.

32. What do these books offer?
Rat Naps is obviously a pdb and I take my hat off to the authors!
What phase would you have to be at to read it?
How would you use it? Refer to WBaW handout for Questions to Consider when planning GR using pdb.
What would you get from Oi Frog!?
Great for phonemic awareness and enjoyment; vocabulary; even inference.
Would it be possible only to use “real” books like this to practise phonics into reading?
What would be a good “rule of thumb” for a balance of pdbs and “real” books in, say, guided reading?
HO Great books for teaching phonics (from NLT)

33. Phonics into writing
“If children have to concentrate to ensure their transcription is accurate, they will be less able to think about the content of their writing.” EEF
How important is phoneme-grapheme correspondence as opposed to GPC?
“Once you can spell a word, you can read it.” Paul Bissex (aged 5) GNYS at Work
First point is to do, again, with the importance of developing automaticity.
How do GPC and PGC balance out? What is the effect of one on the other?

34. Research findings
At age 4, “phonological spelling was a stronger longitudinal predictor of reading than was reading a longitudinal predictor of phonological spelling.” (Caravalos, Hume and Snowling, 2001) What does this indicate about the proportion of writing activities to reading activities?
Thinking about application of phonics from the early stages – do you think schools have got the proportion right?
Interesting that in France – French is more phonetically regular but has its own spelling problems – they teach writing before reading.

35. Phonics into writing
Learning to spell words is one way of getting them into your mental lexicon
Phases 4 – 6 of Letters and Sounds have increasing emphasis on writing
Phase 6 is moving from using PGCs to using visual strategies for spelling – good spellers don’t sound words out unless they are unknown words with no available analogies.
Need to be aware that English spelling is influenced by orthographic convention, morphology and etymology as well as PGC and the implications
Spelling helps reading. It can be particularly useful for those children still having difficulty with reading digraphs – learning to spell “road” will help them learn oa as one sound.
Need to ensure that NC is followed. NC is full of requirements – sensible phonics schemes (and spelling schemes) will suggest strategies for teaching and learning which you can apply to the statutory requirements.
Teachers need to be aware that spellings of words are also influenced by orthographic convention (eg, the long a sound is represented by “ay” at the end of a syllable, not “ai”; the /j/ is never “j” at the end of a word, etc.), morphology – what words mean (suffixes such as –ed are always spelt the same no matter what they sound like), and etymology – biscuit from French, for example. Knowing about these elements helps fix words in visual memory.

36. Lucy’s story
“Once upon a time there was a little lamb the lamb had no-one to look after him and he wanted to go to the juicy grass but it was too far for him to go there so he said to himself when I am older I will go spring and summer passed quickly and soon it was autumn and because he had no-one to look after him. But a farmer had seen him he came out of the house and took the lamb inside when he saw there was no label on him he said I will look after you and the lamb lived with him forever.”
You may want to use an example of your own.
Lucy knows quite a bit about phoneme grapheme correspondences and also understands the working process well enough to use her own code, consistently. More important is the freedom she has to invent, because she is able to use tools to make herself understood and is concerned with this, not worried about getting it right. This is what we need to aim for when encouraging children to apply their phonics in writing.

37. Making it work in the classroom
The /k/ in “Percy” says /s/!
Beware the internet – the example comes from a youtube example!
...or not...

38. Effective classroom phonics (1)
Is phonics teaching
fast, lively and fun?
systematic?
resulting in learning for all children (assessment)?
happening every day?
linked to other learning and practised throughout the day?
consistent and faithful to the school’s chosen programme?
Discuss.
Phonics champions will need to know that all of these things are true – will they be able to monitor phonics teaching? It’s really the only way of being sure it’s being done well. This might be something SLEs could support in school?
What might the implications be for staff training?
It might be helpful to give some examples of things that can all too easily go wrong – e.g, the teacher who got children to write on w’boards but didn’t think to check that what they’d written was correct, the child who’d written “thay” 8 times because the teacher hadn’t said “write it once then show me!”, the new TA with a different accent to that used locally, teaching the children what they thought was a new sound, the small boy who managed to hide under a beanbag in the reading corner...
If time – show example of kind of activity that might be done.

39. Sequence of teaching in a phonics session
Introduction
Revisit and review
Teach
Practise
Apply
Assess learning against criteria
This won’t necessarily happen every single time, but it’s what you’d expect to see unless there was a very good reason for doing it differently. And it has to be pacy!
Look at a Letters and Sounds example (or if you know the schools you are working with all use a particular programme, an example from that programme)

40. Some problem areas (1)
Are teachers confident in helping children distinguish individual phonemes?
Consider words like
witch
strap
chemist
What problems might these present?
How many phonemes in these words?
Many people claim to hear “witch” as 4 phonemes -/w/ /i/ /t/ /ch/. In reality it’s three - /w/ /i/ /tch/. /tch/ sounds just the same as /ch/.
“strap” has adjacent consonants which some people tend to run together as one sound. There are in fact 5 phonemes.
The same problem occurs in “chemist” with the –st. There is also the problem of –em-.
You need to be aware of what your mouth is doing when making sounds – if you have to move it in the course of making a sound, you’re making more than one!

41. Some problem areas (2) - vowels
Short and long vowel sounds can cause confusion!
eight, ate, bath, bat, barn – which have short/long vowels?
Problems lie with accent and pronunciation
And also the fact that we have to oversimplify for the sake of teaching...
How might we clarify for children and teachers?
We usually think of the /ai/ in eight as long and the /a/ in cat as short, and for practical purposes this works, but we need to be aware that there are complications:
“ate” and “bath” will vary in pronunciation according to accent.
The “a” in bath, pronounced as it would be in RP, is actually a long sound, as is “ar” in “barn”.
Phoneticists would say that some of the vowel phonemes detailed in L and S (look at Table 2 handout) particularly the trigraphs, are diphthongs – that is, “a speech sound in one syllable where the articulation begins as for one vowel and moves towards another” – consider coin, barn, dear (especially in some local accents?)
It’s only really helpful to distinguish between short sounds and long sounds when you are using them to spell (when you’re reading, you’ll recognise whether a vowel is using a long or short sound if it’s in your mental lexicon), when it’s useful to be able to discuss how to “make the vowel say its name” for example by adding an “e” (or to make it say its short sound, for example by doubling a consonant).
The vowel rap (short vowels):
a,e,i,o,u
this is how we say them
we say them soft
we say them loud
of our vowels we sure are proud
this is how we say them!
For long vowels, say “this is how we name them”

42. Some problem areas (3) – some consonant phonemes
Which consonant phonemes can be difficult to teach/learn?
Often dependent on accent
The “hard to hear” sounds like /v/, /zh/ /ng/
Can result in “tricky words”
Harder to learn for spelling than for reading?
Again, strictly speaking /ng/ is a diphthong.
Can be confusing because “ng” can say /ng/, /ng+g/, /nj/ and
“n”makes the phoneme /ng/ before “k” as in pink
Children will usually read ”of” correctly but may well spell it “ov”. /v/ is hard to hear – pay careful attention to mouth shape.
/zh/ is the sound made by “s” in measure, treasure, vision. (In some accents, “ss” can also be pronounced like this, but this is rare!) You might draw attention to it if you come across these words when reading, and it might be a good idea to practise writing words like this to reinforce knowledge of the sound and to begin to learn the spelling
Look at

43. Effective classroom phonics (2)
It’s important
to pay attention to mouth movement when saying phonemes
not to voice consonants if it can be avoided
to pronounce phonemes, especially vowels, consistently – consider accents
Useful website!

44. Some problem areas (3) Tricky words
By tricky words we usually mean high frequency words which are not transparently decodable, such as “they” and “said”.
Typically, these words do conform at least partially to phonic rules.
We tend to teach them as sight words, but research shows that they are recognised more quickly when recognition is underpinned by grapheme-phoneme knowledge
So when teaching these, it’s best to draw attention to the regular phonemes and then focus on the “tricky bit”.
Activities might include using sound lines and buttons, playing with the “tricky bit” by highlighting, playing matching graphemes and digraphs (demonstrate this).

45. Effective classroom phonics (3)
Children need to know letter names as well as sounds (NC). Why is this?
When teaching the alphabet, singing is useful – but only if it doesn’t run the letters together – try Auld Lang Syne!
Partly because of the tricky words and spelling – better to teach “a” “i” in the middle of “said” than sounding it out!
Also, letters can make a variety of sounds, but have only one name. It’s no good saying that /t/ /h/ says /th/ since it plainly doesn’t. And what about “y”?
Also, every letter with the exception of “w” has one of its main sounds in its name, which is a useful mnemonic, and also facilitates very early writing. Paul Bissex, aged 3, once wrote a note to his mother when she was on the phone and not paying him any attention. It said “RUDF”.

46. And finally – some non-negotiables
At least 20 minutes discrete phonics teaching per day
Children assessed and on correct phase
Catch-up for those falling behind
Opportunities for application throughout the day
A rich language curriculum from the start
Never losing sight of what phonics is for!

47. Next steps Before the next session, you could find out
what phonics programmes your schools are using. Are they being used consistently? Do staff need training in the scheme? What CPD needs does the school have?
how successful are your schools at teaching a)phonics and b)reading and writing? Look at results. Are there any mismatches?
are there any particular issues facing your schools?
Which of these would you find useful if you had to prioritise?
You will need to alter this slide if you want to use it with your schools – it is currently suggestions for you, but could be used with phonics champions.

48. Plenary Do you feel confident with the content of the training so far?
Do you feel confident to deliver it back in school?