Early reading and

Aim: To explain our approach to teaching phonics and early reading, enabling you as a parent/carer to support your child more easily and more effectively at home.

Put simply, synthetic phonics... Speaking and listening is vital, and is the first step to reading and writing. Sounds and letters are taught in a particular order. Fast, fun, first Left to right

Read, Write, Inc. and phonic families Say it once! The importance of “hamming it up!” When to use letter names Correcting spelling – the dos and don’ts The “have a go” philosophy Markmaking/tracing/handwriting including whooshes!

Phonic terminology:

Some definitions A phoneme is the smallest unit of sound in a word

Some definitions Grapheme Letter(s) representing a phoneme taiigh

Enunciation Stretchy sounds - e.g. ssssss, mmmmmm, llllllll, nnnnnn, shhhhhhh, rrrrrrr, zzzzzzzz, vvvvvvv Bouncy sounds - e.g. /c/ /t/ /p/ /b/ /d/ /g/ Unvoiced - /c/, /t/, /h/ and /p/ No schwa-ing! c not ‘cuh’

Some definitions Digraph Two letters, which make one sound A consonant digraph contains two consonants shckthll A vowel digraph contains at least one vowel ai ee ar oy

Some definitions Trigraph Three letters, which make one sound igh

Sorting game Sort the cards on your table into short vowel sounds, vowel digraphs, consonants and consonant digraphs. Watch out for sneaky ones! Don’t worry – we will give you a handout at the end!

Some definitions Blending Recognising the letter sounds in a word and putting them together in the order in which they are written to pronounce the word eg. ‘cup’.

Some definitions Oral blending Hearing a series of spoken sounds and –merging them together to make a spoken word – no text is used For example, when a teacher calls out ‘b-u-s’, the children say ‘bus’ –This skill is usually taught before blending and reading printed words –Let’s try!

Some definitions Segmenting Identifying the individual sounds in a spoken word (e.g. h-i-m) and writing down or manipulating letters for each sound to form the word ‘him’ Again – we learn how to do this orally first. Let’s try oral segmenting!

Try these with a partner Cup fish Chip bed rain Boat man

Letters and Sounds:

Phase One: Aspects 1.Environmental Sounds 2.Instrumental Sounds 3.Body Percussion 4.Rhythm and Rhyme 5.Alliteration 6.Voice Sounds 7.Oral Blending and Segmenting

How can you support Phase One at home? Nursery rhymes Storytelling Listening tapes Robot talk Be aware of your own enunciation – practise together in the mirror! Skipping/clapping rhymes Don’t skip this bit and don’t stop when we start learning letters

Phase Two To introduce GPCs About 6 weeks s a t p i n m d secure the reversible skills of blending / segmenting if needed.

Phase Three To teach children one grapheme for each of the 44 phonemes in order to read and attempt to spell simple regular words (cvc) (about 12 weeks) More volunteers please!

CVC words What are they? Some points to note

Words sometimes wrongly identified as CVC bow few saw her You try!

CVC sort

Teaching letter names Letter names are introduced through alphabet songs in Phase 3 Children should be able to recognise letters by name and sound on an alphabet frieze including lower and upper case letters

Phase 4 To teach children to read and spell words containing adjacent consonantsadjacent consonants (about 6 weeks)

Examples of CCVC, CVCC, CCCVC and CCVCC b l a c k s t r o ng c c v c c c c v c f e l tb l a n k c v c cc c v c c

A segmenting activity

s

sl

sli

slip

Segment these words into their constituent phonemes: shelf dress think stretch sprint flick

Segmenting WORDPHONEMES shelfshelf dressdress thinkthink stretchstretch sprintsprint flickflick

Tricky words and high frequency words

12 words = ¼ of the words we read every day 100 words = ½ of the words we read every day

Reading in school and at home An activity for you to try!

My child won’t read! Stay calm Take a step back Make it fun – read to your child instead Getting “stuck” on some words Flash cards/games Secret messages/treasure hunts Let them see you reading Talk about books you like and books you don’t! Talk to us!

My child won’t write! Shaving foam Mud Sand Squeezy bottles Scratch in soap Air writing Letters on your back Cornflour Glue and glitter Stones/sticks

Questions and Close