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Phonics

In school, we follow the Letters and Sounds programme. Letters and Sounds is a phonics resource published by the Department for Education and Skills which consists of six phases. We begin teaching phonics in our nursery, where the children will be introduced to and work their way through Phase 1. The children will then work on Phases 2 and 3 in reception class, Phases 4 and 5 in year one and Phase 6 in year two. 

The Terminology

Phoneme

A phoneme is the smallest unit of sound in a word. It is generally accepted that most varieties of spoken English use about 44 phonemes. These are the sounds that you can hear the letters make in words.

Graphemes

A grapheme is a symbol of a phoneme. It is a letter or group of letters representing a sound when written down.

Segmenting and blending

Segmenting consists of breaking words down into phonemes to spell. Blending consists of building words from phonemes to read. Both skills are vitally important in the development of early reading and writing.

Digraph

This is when two letters come together to make a phoneme. For example, /oa/ makes the sound in ‘boat’ and is also known as a vowel digraph. There are also consonant digraphs, for example, /sh/ and /ch/.

Trigraph

This is when three letters come together to make one phoneme, for example /igh/.

Split digraph

A digraph in which the two letters are not adjacent and have been split up by another letter – e.g. make, the k has split the digraph ‘ae’.

Abbreviations

VC, CVC, and CCVC are the respective abbreviations for vowel-consonant, consonant-vowel-consonant, consonant-consonant-vowel-consonant, and are used to describe the order of graphemes in words (e.g. am (VC), Sam (CVC), slam (CCVC).

Phase 1

Phase One of ‘Letters and Sounds’ concentrates on developing children's speaking and listening skills and lays the foundations for the phonic work which starts in Phase 2. The emphasis during Phase 1 is to get children attuned to the sounds around them and ready to begin developing oral blending and segmenting skills. Phase 1 is divided into seven aspects.

Each aspect contains three strands:

· Tuning in to sounds (auditory discrimination)

· Listening and remembering sounds (auditory memory and sequencing)

· Talking about sounds (developing vocabulary and language comprehension)

Phase 2

In Phase 2, letters and their sounds are introduced one at a time. A set of letters is taught each week, in the following sequence:

Set 1: s, a, t, p

Set 2: i, n, m, d

Set 3: g, o, c, k

Set 4: ck, e, u, r

Set 5: h, b, f, ff, l, ll, ss

The children will begin to learn to blend and segment to help begin reading and spelling. This will begin with simple words.

Words using set 1:

Words using set 1 and 2:

Words using set 1-3:

Words using set 1-4:

Words using set 1-5:

Alongside this, children are introduced to tricky words. These are the words that are irregular. This means that phonics cannot be applied to the reading and spelling of these words. We teach the children that they have to be learnt by recognition.

The tricky words introduced in phase 2 are:

Phase 3

By the time children reach Phase 3, they will already be able to blend and segment words containing the 19 letters taught in Phase 2. Over the twelve weeks which Phase 3 is expected to last, twenty-five new graphemes are introduced (one at a time).

Set 6: j, v, w, x

Set 7: y, z, zz, qu

Consonant digraphs: ch, sh, th, ng

Vowel digraphs: ai, ee, igh, oa, oo, ar, or, ur, ow, oi, ear, air, ure,

er

Tricky words:

Phase 4

By Phase 4, children will be able to represent each of the 42 phonemes with a grapheme. They will blend phonemes to read and segment CCVC words for spelling. They will also be able to read two syllable words that are simple. They will be able to read all the tricky words learnt so far and will be able to spell some of them. This phase consolidates all the children have learnt in the previous phases and they start to work with adjacent consonants in words, such as fl, br, str, etc.

Tricky words:

Phase 5

Children will be taught new graphemes and alternative pronunciations for these graphemes, as well as graphemes they already know. They will begin to learn to choose the appropriate grapheme when spelling.

New graphemes for reading:

Tricky words:

Phase 6

In phase 6, the focus is on learning spelling rules for word endings (these are known as suffixes). The children will learn how words change when you add certain letters. There are 12 different suffixes taught:

-s -es -ing -ed

-er -est -y -en

-ful -ly -ment -ness

Phonics at home

Tips for teaching your child the sounds:

¨ It is important for a child to learn lower case or small letters rather than capital letters at first. Most early books and games use lower case letters and your child will learn these first at school. Obviously you should use a capital letter when required, such as at the beginning of the child's name, e.g. Paul.

¨ When you talk about letters to your child, remember to use the letter sounds rather than the alphabet names of the letters. The reason for this is that sounding out words is practically impossible if you use the alphabet names. eg. cut, would sound like: see you tee!

¨ When saying the sounds of b, d, g, j and w you will notice the 'uh' sound which follows each, for example buh, duh... You cannot say the sound without it, however, try to emphasise the main letter sound. Try hard not to add this ‘uh’ sound on to the end of letters such as s, c, h and p.

Useful webpages

http://www.letters-and-sounds.com

http://www.phonicsplay.co.uk

https://www.oxfordowl.co.uk/for-home/reading-owl/phonics-made-easy/

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