3 rd October 2014

In school, we follow the Letters and Sounds programme. Letters and Sounds is a phonics resource published by the Department for Education and Skills which consists of six phases. We use Phonics Play and Phonics Bug.

blend (vb) — to draw individual sounds together to pronounce a word, e.g. s-n-a-p, blended together reads snap cluster — two (or three) letters making two (or three) sounds, e.g. the first three letters of 'straight' are a consonant cluster digraph — two letters making one sound, e.g. sh, ch, th, ph. vowel digraphs comprise of two vowels which, together, make one sound, e.g. ai, oo, ow split digraph — two letters, split, making one sound, e.g. a-e as in make or i-e in site grapheme — a letter or a group of letters representing one sound, e.g. sh, ch, igh, ough (as in 'though') grapheme-phoneme correspondence (GPC) — the relationship between sounds and the letters which represent those sounds; also known as 'letter-sound correspondences' mnemonic — a device for memorising and recalling something, such as a snake shaped like the letter 'S' phoneme — the smallest single identifiable sound, e.g. the letters 'sh' represent just one sound, but 'sp' represents two (/s/ and /p/) segment (vb) — to split up a word into its individual phonemes in order to spell it, e.g. the word 'cat' has three phonemes: /c/, /a/, /t/ VC, CVC, CCVC — the abbreviations for vowel-consonant, consonant-vowel-consonant, consonant-consonant-vowel-consonant, which are used to describe the order of letters in words, e.g. am, ham, slam. Terminology

Phase 1 – pre school  A1 – Environmental  A2 – Instrumental sounds  A3 – Body Percussion  A4 – Rhythm and rhyme  A5 – Alliteration  A6 – Voice sounds  A7 – Oral blending and segmenting.

Phase 2 – Busy Bees  Set 1: s, a, t, p  Set 2: i, n, m, d  Set 3: g, o, c, k  Set 4: ck, e, u, r  Set 5: h, b, f, ff, l, ll, ss

Phase 3 – Busy Bees  Set 6: j, v, w, x  Set 7: y, z, zz, qu  Consonant digraphs: ch, sh, th, ng  Vowel digraphs: ai, ee, igh, oa, oo, ar, or, ur, ow, oi, ear, air, ure, er

Phase 4 – Some Busy Bees/ Ladybirds  This phase consolidates all the children have learnt in the previous phases.

Phase 5 – Year 1/ some year 2 consolidtion  Children will be taught new graphemes and alternative pronunciations for these graphemes.  Vowel digraphs: wh, ph, ay, ou, ie, ea, oy, ir, ue, aw, ew, oe, au  Split digraphs: (magic ‘e’!) a_e, e_e, i_e, o_e, u_e

Phase 6 – Year 2  The focus is on learning spelling rules for suffixes. -s -es -ing -ed -er -est -y -en -ful -ly -ment -ness

Segmenting  Breaking down words for spelling. cat

Segmenting Queen qu ee n

Blending Building words from phonemes to read. c a t

Blending Qu ee n queen

What does a Phonics lesson look like? Revisit/reviewFlashcards to practice phonemes learnt so far. TeachTeach new phoneme air PracticeBuried treasure Air, zair, fair, hair, lair, pair, vair, sair, thair ApplyRead captions: The goat had a long beard. The quack was right in his ear.

Resources

Year 1 Phonics Test

Useful Websites ces_info/1032_phonics_glossary years/letters-and-sounds