Phonics and Early Reading Downs Way Infant School 12th October 2016

Loving reading…. Enjoying stories and rhymes Telling stories Sharing books – starting to understand that the funny squiggles near to the pictures are words and that words are made up of patterns of letters! It is absolutely crucial that children have stories read to them throughout their childhood – even when they begin to read for themselves!

Learning to read – the mechanics Recognising sounds Being able to repeat sounds Putting a sound to a picture/symbol– this is reading Putting a picture/symbol to a sound – this is writing

Matching the sounds We use ‘Jolly Phonics’ to help the children remember how the sounds and symbols match up This also gives them an ACTION to make And there are songs and rhymes too

Matching the sounds Some sounds have more than one letter – and it is really important that children recognise them as single sounds And what is worse is that in English different combinations can make the same sounds!

Segmenting Seeing a word Breaking it down into all the little sounds (phonemes) We talk to the children about each ‘grapheme’ having a ‘sound button’ underneath it. They image that they are pressing the button – and make the ‘sound’ themselves c a t

Segmenting They also need to see the ‘sounds’ that are represented by a ‘group’ of letters in words These are represented by a LINE underneath So now they can look at what originally looked like a random block of squiggles and break it down into sounds b oa t

Blending n   Once they have got all the separate sounds they need to run all those sounds together to make a word. We show this by pressing every sound button and then running our finger under the word from left to right to blend all the sounds together Once they start to get the hang of this they can begin to ‘decode’ unfamiliar words cat

Unfortunately English is NOT a phonically regular language! Tricky Words….. So ‘phonics’ are a really good way of ‘getting going’ with reading. Unfortunately English is NOT a phonically regular language! To help the children we put the words that ‘don’t work’ on ‘tricky trucks’ –and encourage them to ‘see’ the whole word

Beyond Phonics By the end of year 1 we would hope that most children will have mastered their phonics In year 2 they move on to looking at spelling patterns and starting to recognise more words by sight There is of course an overlap! Many children benefit from keeping a focus on phonics throughout their time in KS1

Making it fun Phonics Play www.phonicsplay.co.uk In school we use the webs resource ‘Phonics Play to support our teaching of phonics. The school subscribes to this – but individuals can too. For £12 you can have access at home to these phonics games for a year. But you will need to supervise them playing to get the best benefit – it’s not a cheap baby sitter!

Supporting Reading EYFS – workshop in Angelfish class Year 1 workshop in Turtles class Year 2 workshop in Dolphins class Please choose which workshop you would like to attend. We will gather back in the hall in half an hour