Knutsford School Phonics for Parents

Aims To share how phonics is taught at Knutsford. To develop parents’ confidence in helping their children with phonics and reading. To teach the basics of phonics and some useful phonics terms. To outline the different stages in phonic development. To show some examples of activities and resources we use to support phonics teaching. To give parents an opportunity to ask questions. To share websites which parents can use to support their children.

Why teach phonics? The ability to read and write well is a vital skill for all children, paving the way for an enjoyable and successful school experience. Phonics helps children to develop good reading and spelling skills. e.g. ‘cat’ can be sounded out for reading and spelling We use a synthetic scheme called ‘Letters and Sounds’ as our teaching resource. Jolly Phonics is used for it’s kinesthetic approach and is follows to the ‘Letters and Sounds’.

Daily Phonics Every day the children have a 20 minute session of phonics. Fast paced approach. Lessons encompass a range of games, songs and rhymes. We use the Letters and Sounds planning document to support the teaching of phonics. There are 5 phonics phases which the children work through at their own pace.

Lesson format In each year group, phonics lessons follow the same format: Revise: the children revise previous learning. Teach: new phonemes or high frequency or tricky words are taught. Practice: the children practise the new learning by reading and/or writing the words. Apply: the children apply their new learning by reading or writing sentences.

Phonic terms we teach your child Phoneme Grapheme Blending Segmenting Digraph Trigraph Phoneme frame Sound button Tricky words CVC

When do we teach the 6 Phases? Nursery and Reception Phases 1, 2, 3 and 4 Year 1 Phase 5

Glossary Phoneme: the smallest unit of sound that is found within a word. Grapheme: the spelling of the sound e.g. Th. Blending: putting the sounds together to read a word. Segmenting: breaking up a word into its sounds. Digraph: two letters that make one sound when read. Trigraph: three letters that make one sound. Tricky words: words that cannot easily be decoded. CVC: stands for consonant, vowel, consonant.

Phase 1 Phase 1 was designed to help children to: Listen attentively Enlarge their vocabulary Speak confidently Discriminate phonemes Reproduce audibly the phonemes they hear

Phase 1 Phase 1 includes games and activities that are based on: Environmental sounds Instrumental sounds Body percussion Rhythm and rhyme Alliteration Voice sounds Oral blending and segmenting

Phase 1 Hunting for sounds in the school environment. You could try this at home, in the garden, in the car…

Phase 1: helping at home Go on a sound hunt (see previous slide). Nursery rhymes, songs, action rhymes. Add sound effects to stories. Music and movement: rhythm, guess the instrument. Talking about sounds: listening walks, loud/quiet, high/low, silly noises. Speaking & listening: silly sentences ‘Happy Harry hops’, mimics, animal sounds.

Phase 2 Phase 2 is the start of systematic phonics teaching and learning. Children begin to understand grapheme - phoneme correspondence. They begin to understand that words are constructed from phonemes and that phonemes are represented by graphemes.

Phase 2: phonemes In Phase 2 the children learn the first 19 phonemes: Set 1: s a t p Set 2: i n m d Set 3: g o c k Set 4: ck (as in duck) e u r Set 5: h b l f ff (as in puff) ll (as in hill) ss (as in hiss) They use these phonemes to read and spell simple ‘consonant-vowel-consonant’ (CVC) words: sat, tap, dig, duck, rug, puff, hill, hiss All these words contain 3 phonemes.

Phase 2: graphemes Graphemes are the letters that represent phonemes. Children need to practise recognising the grapheme and saying the phoneme that it represents. The grapheme could be 1 letter, 2 letters or more. t ai igh

Phase 2: blending In Phase 2 the children begin to blend for reading. They need to be able to hear the separate sounds in a word and then blend them together to say the whole word. They start with simple VC (vowel consonant) words, e.g. at, it, is. They move on to CVC (consonant vowel consonant) words. e.g. dog, cat, man.

Blending /b/ /e/ /d/ = bed /t/ /i/ /n/ = tin /m/ /u/ /g/ = mug

Phase 2: segmenting In Phase 2 the children begin to segment for spelling. They need to be able to hear a whole word and say every sound that they hear. Segmenting is the opposite of blending.

Segmenting bed = /b/ /e/ /d/ tin= /t/ /i/ /n/ mug= /m/ /u/ /g/

Pseudo words Segment and blend these pseudo words: drep blom gris Nonsense games like this help to build up skills – and they are fun too! You may hear the children refer to these as alien words or non-words.

Phase 2: digraphs The children are taught the term digraph. This means that the phoneme comprises of two letters: e.g. ll, ff, ck, ss

High frequency words (HFW) These are words that children will read a lot. The first 100 HFW have been put into Phases and the children may bring these home to learn. These are our ‘quick as a click’ words. In each phase there are decodable (can be sounded out) and tricky words (can’t be sounded out).

Tricky words There are many words that cannot be blended or segmented because they are irregular, e.g. thewassome saidyou

Phase 3: Long vowel phonemes Children start Phase 3 once they know the first 19 phonemes and can blend and segment to read and spell CVC words. They learn another 26 phonemes: j, v, w, x, y, z, zz, qu ch, sh, th, ng, ai, ee, igh, oa, oo, ar, or, ur, ow, oi, ear, air, ure, er They use these phonemes (and the ones from Phase 2) to read and spell words, e.g. chip, shop, thin, ring, pain, feet, night, boat, boot, look, farm, fork, burn, town, coin, dear, fair, sure

Phase 3: trigraphs The children are taught the term trigraph. This means that the phoneme comprises of three letters, e.g. igh, ear, ure. These make one phoneme. S-igh-t (sight) is a CVC word because it has 3 phonemes.

Phoneme frames The children often use phoneme frames to show they can segment the phonemes in a word:

Phase 4: Consonant clusters Children start Phase 4 when they know all the phonemes from Phases 2 and 3 and can use them to read and spell simple words (blending to read and segmenting to spell). In Phase 4 the children learn to read and spell words with four or more phonemes. Phase 4 doesn’t introduce any new phonemes. It focuses on reading and spelling longer words with the phonemes the children already know. These words have consonant clusters at the beginning: spot, trip, clap, green, clown … or at the end: tent, mend, damp, burnt … or at the beginning and end: trust, spend, twist

Phase 5 In Phase 5 the children are taught new graphemes for reading: ay, ou, ie, ea, oy, ir, ue, aw, wh, ph, ew, oe, au, a-e, e-e, i-e, o-e, u-e They learn alternative pronunciations of graphemes (the same grapheme can represent more than one phoneme): fin/find, hot/cold, cat/cent, got/giant, but/put, cow/blow, tie/field, eat/bread, hat/what, yes/by/very, chin/school/chef, out/shoulder/could/you

Learning all the variations (1) In Phase 5 the children learn that the same phoneme can be represented in more than one way – the sound is the same in each word but the spellings are different: burn first term heard work

Learning all the variations (2) The children also learn that the same grapheme can represent more than one phoneme - the spellings are the same but they sound different: meatbread hebed bearhear cowlow

Split diagraphs We teach the children that sometimes the two letters thatmake one sound are split: tie time toe tone cue cube pie pine

Year 1 spelling There is some cross over in Y1 with phonics and spelling where children are securing their reading and begin to focus on spellings and learning rules for spelling alternatives. Children look at syllables, base words, analogy and mnemonics. The children might learn about past tense. They might learn rules for adding ‘ing’ and ’ed’. strategies-for-spelling-display-posters-phase-6http:// strategies-for-spelling-display-posters-phase-6

Is there anything you can do at home? yes

How many words can you make? Pick one grapheme from each box to make up some words. Decide if they are real words or alien words. m b s a i ut p n

What if my child is finding it difficult? Remember, learning anything new takes practice - it is the same with learning to read. Revisit phonemes-graphemes already learnt. Don’t do too much in one go - a small amount each day is more helpful than the occasional 30 minutes. Remember, your child has had a full day at school and may well be tired, so keep it fun. Share books, looking at the pictures and listening to your child read is valuable as it prepares children for reading. Ask your child’s teacher if you need any further advice.

Enjoy reading! REMEMBER: phonics is not the only thing needed to become a fluent reader. Please continue to read with your child each night and encourage them to: - sound out - re-read to check it makes sense - use pictures for clues - ask questions about the book - and most importantly - ENJOY READING

Useful Websites sounds/ sounds/ mlhttp:// ml

Don’t forget… Learning to read should be fun for both children and parents. And keep practising …it will get easier. We hope you have found this helpful.