Elm Grove Primary School 2018 Phonics Meeting Elm Grove Primary School 2018

What is Phonics? What is a phoneme? Phonics is a method for teaching reading and writing of the English language by developing learners‘ ability to hear, identify, and manipulate phonemes. What is a phoneme? A phoneme is the sound that a letter or group of letters makes. At Elm Grove we follow a phonics programme called ‘Letters and Sounds’. This programme follows a systematic order to teach the phonemes, so children can quickly begin to blend and segment to read and write words. Blending – putting sounds together to make a word (used for reading) Segmenting – breaking a word up into sounds (used for writing)

Activities to develop this skill: Phase 1 - Pre-skills Before children can identify and manipulate the sounds in words, they need to be able to discriminate sounds around them. Activities to develop this skill: * Listening walks – identifying sounds you hear around you * Body percussion – making and copying sounds * Singing songs and action rhymes – to develop awareness of sounds and rhythm * Making shakers/ playing instruments - making loud and quiet sounds

d - o - g Phase 1 - Pre-skills Activities to develop these skills: Children can then begin to play with the sounds they hear in words. This includes hearing rhythm and rhyme, alliteration and orally blending and segmenting words. Activities to develop these skills: Reading rhyming stories Matching rhyming words Playing I-spy type games ‘something beginning with ’sss’ Silly soup – putting in ingredients that start with the same sound Robot talking – breaking a word into sounds ‘c-u-p’ d - o - g

s a t p i n m d g o c k ck e u r h b f ff l ll ss Phase 2 Teaching single letters and sounds It is important to distinguish between the NAME of the letter and the SOUND it can make. It is important that each phoneme is pronounced clearly and without a ‘uh’ on the end. Order of phonemes learnt: s a t p i n m d g o c k ck e u r h b f ff l ll ss Some phonemes are made up of two or three letters (e.g. sh, or, igh)

Phonics sessions in Reception We will have daily phonics sessions of around 15 minutes. We try to keep these as active as possible as we know this is how children learn best! Structure of a session: * Revise – Practicing Phase 1 skills/ Recapping phonemes learnt Teach – Introducing a new phoneme How it sounds and what it looks like Actions and pictures to help * Practice – Playing games * Apply – reading and writing (building up to captions and sentences)

High Frequency Words / Tricky Words Alongside teaching children the phonemes we also teach high frequency words. These are common words that they will come across a lot in their early reading and writing – perhaps before they have learnt the letters and sounds that make them. For example – is, and, can, of, will Tricky words are also common words, but have more complex spelling patterns. They cannot be sounded out easily so we learn them as a whole word instead. I, a, go, no, to, the We do this through songs, games and reading repetitive texts that include the words.

What can you do to support your child at home? Practise the sounds and HFW your child brings home in their homework folders Play games that continue to develop their listening, blending and segmenting skills. (e.g. I spy, robot talk, sound bingo, rhyming songs) Notice letters and words around you (e.g. street signs, posters, bus routes, logos) Use magnetic letters on the fridge to build words. Continue reading to your child, so they can hear and discuss a wide range of books. When your child starts bringing home a levelled reading book, encourage them to spot the HFW words and phonemes they have been learning. (More detail on this during reading meeting)

dot w e l l Phonics Terminology Phoneme – is a sound you can hear. There are approximately 44 phonemes in the English language. Phonemes are put together to make words. Grapheme – a phoneme when it is written down. Graphemes can be made up of 1 letter ‘a’, 2 letters ‘sh’ (digraph) or i-e (split digraph), 3 letters ‘igh’ (trigraph) or 4 letters ‘ough’ Blending – reading a word by putting the graphemes together. I see the word cat, I recognise the graphemes c-a-t and I can blend the phonemes and hear the word says cat. Segmenting – the skill needed to write a word, hearing all the phonemes in a word. I want to write cat and I can segment the word and hear I need c-a-t. Sound buttons – we add these to words, to help the children with segmenting to read. Phoneme frame – an aid to help segment words dot w e l l

Useful Websites www.phonicsplay.com www.letters-and-sounds.com www.oxfordowl.co.uk/home/reading-owl/expert- help/phonics-made-easy www.turtlediary.com/games/phonics.html Mr Thorne does Phonics on YouTube Alphablocks on Cbeebies