1. Phonics in EYFS

2. The Reading Strategies
Contextual
Grammatical
Graphic
Phonic

3. The Reading Strategies
All important – need them all to be an effective reader
Phonics – fastest results for most children
Evidence based approach – national strategy, phonics assessment end Y1

4. Our Phonics Scheme
Letters and Sounds

5. Rationale
Learn the sound made by letters before the name of the letter
Learn letters in an order where you can make words as soon as possible
Recognise that some words cannot be blended (read with phonics knowledge) and need to be learnt by sight
Link the sound to the letter in listening, speaking, reading and writing

6. First set of letters s a t p i n
Learn to read these sounds wherever they are in the word, e.g. s always says s, whether sat, cats,
Learn to blend the sounds into words – at, sat, sap

7. First ‘tricky’ words I Was He She Me We
Talk about why they are tricky. Learn them by sight.

8. Progresssion through KS1
New letter sets – e.g. gock
New tricky words – said, went
Less common letter combinations – ch, sh
Vowel digraphs and trigraphs
Consonant digraphs and trigraphs
Blends
Alternate spellings of a sound – ai, a, ay, a-e
Regular and irregular tense endings – ed, ing
Learning spelling patterns

9. The Challenges Most children can identify the sound – can hear and say
Most children can make the link to the letter by the end of EYFS
Most children find it hard to BLEND individual sounds into words and need to practise, practise, practise!
Most children find it harder still to write the letter and segment words for spelling, e.g. I a-m a c –a –t.

10. What might help
Making a sounds scrapbook to refer to regularly – helps child take ownership
Blending – magnetic letters, scraps of paper, foam letters, letters in chalk etc
Using free web–based resources, e.g. Letters and Sounds site has games, BBC also good
Jolly Phonics songs and actions
Alphablocks – TV, DVD and magazine produced by BBC makes blending very easy to understand.
Cursive writing practise – many free sheets available online, including sparklebox.

11. Top Tip
Try to say the smallest sound possible, to avoid adding other letters to your sound, e.g. ‘u’ not ‘uh’, ‘d’ not ‘durr’
Try listening online to how the sounds should be said, e.g. on Mumsnet

12. Jargon busting
Phoneme – unit of sound, can be more than one letter (e.g. s, or ch, or ai)
Grapheme – how the sound is represented in writing
Blend – letters that make their sound very close together or blended e.g. bl, sl
Also to blend phonemes (to put sounds together to make words)
Digraph – two letters together making a new phoneme, e.g. ch, sh
Trigraph – three letter phoneme igh,
Segment – to take a word apart into the separate phonemes for spelling

13. Finally No shortcuts – you will need to work at it
Most children love phonics lessons
Try to link the writing (or at least making the letter shape with the arm or finger) as soon as possible
Thank you for your support!