Phonics in the Foundation Stage

Phonics is... Phonics is a method for teaching reading and writing of the English language by developing learners' phonetic awareness—the ability to hear, identify, and manipulate phonemes—in order to teach the correspondence between these sounds and the spelling patterns (graphemes) that represent them.

Vocabulary Phoneme – smallest unit of sound in a word. Grapheme – a letter or sequence of letters that represents a phoneme. Diagraph – 2 letters 1 sound (phoneme).Trigraph – 3 letters 1 sound (phoneme).

Phonic schemes.  At Kings Cliffe Endowed we teach the children phonics through the Letters and Sounds Programme.  The scheme is taught in 6 phases.  Children in foundation are expected to be working towards the end of phase 4 by the time they start key stage 1.

Teaching sounds (phonemes) Whilst the progression of sounds is taught using the Letters and Sounds programme, the way the sounds are learnt can often be a mixture of jolly phonics (physical actions and sound songs) and read write inc (for letter formation rhymes). Once a child has been introduced to a new sound the sound is revisited and practised frequently through games and activities.

Letters and Sounds  In the autumn term the children start phase 1, which is all about listening to sounds in the environment.  The children play a lots of listening games to help them to prepare to listen for sounds in phase 2.  Even when children progress onto the other phases it is still important to continually revisit phase 1.

Phase 1 Phase 1 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. The letters are taught in sets 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  Plus tricky words – the, I, no, go, to, into.

Blending to read Phase 2 is also when the children are introduced to the concept of blending sounds to read and segmenting words to spell. Blending is taught by saying each sound and then blending them together until the word is read on sight. An example of blending can be seen here: mEQfugT8 mEQfugT8

Segmenting to spell Segmenting to spell is where a child splits a word up into each phoneme and then they use their knowledge of all the different phonemes to spell the word. In the foundation stage, spelling is taught to be phonetically correct as opposed to strict spelling patterns. This is because alternative graphemes are not taught until key stage 1. An example of segmenting to spell can be seen here: bjJbHI bjJbHI

Phase 3  In this phase the letter progression and graphemes continue:  Set 6: j v w x  Set 7: y z zz qu  Set 8: ch sh th ng  Children are also taught the long vowel sounds: ai ee igh oa oo  Then - ar or ur ow oi ear air ure er  Plus the tricky words – he, she, we, me, be, was, are, you, they, her.

Your turn - Can you use the phoneme frame to work out how many sounds there are in these words? pigpig churchchurch boy curl thorn chick down shirt

Phase 4 When children start Phase 4, they will know a grapheme for each of the 42 phonemes. They will be able to blend phonemes to read CVC (consonant-vowel-consonant) words and segment in order to spell them. Children will also have begun reading straightforward two-syllable words and simple captions, as well as reading and spelling some tricky words. In Phase 4, no new graphemes are introduced. The main aim of this phase is to consolidate the children's knowledge and to help them learn to read and spell words which have adjacent consonants, such as trap, string and milk.

Games you can play at home Using sound cards: Can you make c-a-t? What does this say? Can you find s? (Show an object) What phoneme does this object start with?

Useful websites/online resources. sounds.com/ sounds.com/ _Sounds_-_DFES pdf _Sounds_-_DFES pdf Djz82FBYiug Djz82FBYiug