EYFS WRITING MATHS READING PHONICS

Why teach phonics? The ability to read  has truly become a necessity to survive and thrive in today’s society . We believe that the best way to teach children to read is to ensure that a high quality, fun, daily phonics programme is delivered to children. Phonics is a method for teaching reading and writing by developing learners' phonemic 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. Reason for inviting you here today is to ensure that we are all on the same page and you know how we are teaching in school and therefore can support your child at home. EYFS WRITING MATHS READING PHONICS

What do some of the terms mean? Phoneme – The smallest unit of sound in a word e.g. s, t Grapheme – Graphical representation of a sound/phoneme – what the sound looks like when written. For some phonemes, this could be more than one letter e.g. ai, igh Digraph – a phoneme represented with 2 letters e.g. Trigraph – a phoneme represented by 3 letters e.g. EYFS WRITING MATHS READING PHONICS

How do we teach phonics at our school? We use a variety of Phonics schemes. Anima Phonics is very visual and practical and, in our opinion, works well within Phases 2 to 5 of Letters and Sounds, along with the Jolly Phonics resources and songs. We have not limited ourselves to one scheme. Our staff have been trained using a variety of schemes. So we use this knowledge to ensure that the children received an exciting range of phonic teaching and activities. EYFS WRITING MATHS READING PHONICS

Blending and Segmenting It is important that children know and understand how to blend and segment in order read and spell words correctly. Blending to read - when phonemes (units of sound) are merged together to pronounce a word. To read an unfamiliar word, children must blend the phonemes together. e.g. Segmenting to spell – When individual sounds are heard in a word. To spell a word, a child must segment a word into the individual phonemes and select the relevant grapheme to represent each of these phonemes . For example a child may write…… . t-i-n t-a-p p-i-n 44 sounds in the English language but only 26 letters. This is one of the reasons that English is a difficult language to learn each letter can represent more that one sound e.g. y can be the ee sound (happy), igh sound (fly) or y sound (yoyo). In Spanish there are only 24 sounds to learn. EYFS WRITING MATHS READING PHONICS

Blending and Segmenting . EYFS WRITING MATHS READING PHONICS

Sound Buttons can chop church EYFS WRITING MATHS READING PHONICS

Examples of phonics session Grapheme, sound, song/poem, action, cursive writing Anima phonics is a multi-sensory approach and is extremely motivating for children and teachers alike. Each grapheme has an action and a poem. At our school, we believe that this practical / audible way of learning sounds works well alongside the ideas in the Letters and Sounds programme. Children can visually be seen to use the actions to spell words. We then apply their new learning by playing a variety of games using the phonemes learnt and then apply their knowledge by practising writing the grapheme. EYFS WRITING MATHS READING PHONICS

Letter Formation Alongside learning all of the phonemes, it is important that children know how to write grapheme correctly. There are many ways that we practise this at our school using cursive handwriting alongside fine motor development. We have pictures with a saying to help them visualise it while writing. Talk about cursive font with a ‘woosh’ at the beginning of every grapheme. We develop our fine motor skills by strengthening the muscles in our hands e.g. playdough EYFS WRITING MATHS READING PHONICS

Why is pronunciation important? Careful pronunciation of sounds is very important to ensure that we are good language models to children. Sounds should be pronounced softly and in a clipped, short manner. Not with a ‘uhhh’ sound. E.g. p(perr) m(merr) Cuh aaa tuh - C-a-t EYFS WRITING MATHS READING PHONICS

Tricky words? We teach “tricky” words which cannot be sounded out when phonemes are blended. Tricky words are taught as WHOLE words by sight. Ideas to practise- Write the word three times. Trace over it in different colours. Look, say, cover, visualise, write, check. Play bingo with the words. Write the word in a nonsense sentence. Find words with similar patterns. e.g. the, them, they Write the word, draw around the shape of the word and cut out. EYFS WRITING MATHS READING PHONICS

Things to remember EYFS WRITING MATHS PHONICS READING

Things to remember… EYFS Share, listen and read regularly Build up reading time gradually Share, listen and read regularly Read for a purpose Reading is complex! EYFS WRITING MATHS READING PHONICS

Some useful websites EYFS https://www.oxfordowl.co.uk/for-home/reading-owl/expert-help/phonics-made-easy https://www.teachyourmonstertoread.com www.phonicsplay.co.uk www.topmarks.co.uk http://www.kenttrustweb.org.uk/kentict/content/games/ www.ictgames.com/literacy http://www.bbc.co.uk/schools/wordsandpictures/cvc/index.shtml http://www.letters-and-sounds.com https://www.jollylearning.co.uk/free-parent-teacher-resources/ https://www.animaphonics.com/home.html EYFS WRITING MATHS READING PHONICS