Learning to Read Using Synthetic Phonics Your School Logo Here

Introducing… Joe Blogs Names here.

Something to think about! More than any other subject or skill, our children’s futures are all but determined by how well they learn to read. Children of the Code 2005

Something to think about! Statistically, more American children suffer long-term life-harm from the process of learning to read than from parental abuse, accidents, and all other childhood diseases and disorders combined. Children of the Code 2005

In purely economic terms, reading related difficulties cost the U.S. more than the war on terrorism, crime, and drugs combined. Children of the Code 2005 Something to think about!

What’s Happening? A good, hard look at literacy rates world wide. An acknowledgement that there needs to be improvement. A return to evidence based decision making in schools. A back to the “New Basics” way of teaching beginning reading.

Teaching Reading We recognise that the teaching of reading has attracted the interest of the media in recent times. Synthetic phonics is no fad. It is based on findings of evidence-based research about how children best learn to read. Every school in England and Wales now needs to teach reading with Synthetic Phonics.

What is synthetic phonics? This is a method that teaches children how spoken words are composed of sounds called phonemes and, how the letters in words correspond to those phonemes.

Reading The process of reading involves 'decoding' words into separate phonemes, so that words can be read. ‘MAKING” We call this blending of sounds ‘MAKING”

Writing and Spelling The process of writing or spelling involves ‘encoding’. Listening for each phoneme in a word and representing it with a letter(s). ‘BREAKING’ This segmenting of words is called ‘BREAKING’.

Is Synthetic Phonics a Fad? No! It has been heavily researched. Some studies tracked student achievement for as long as 7 years.

The Rose Review Department for Education and Skills Independent Review of the Teaching of Early Reading Final Report, Jim Rose, March 2006

What were the Recommendations? The review states: English is a difficult language to learn to read. We have 44 sounds but only 26 letters to make these sounds Schools need to teach how to make these sounds They need to do this with synthetic phonics We need to teach spelling alongside reading

Let’s recap, so we can do a bit of learning!

Synthetic Phonics – What’s it mean? Teaching the sounds of the English language and how these sounds (phonemes) can be written as letters.

Fast - Efficient - Effective A group of letters is introduced at a time. s a t p i n m d Fast?

That many letters? Why? How many words can you make with these letters? s a t p i n m d

So…how many could you make? Wow! That’s a lot for a week at school!

Synthetic Phonics After learning how to recognise and pronounce each of the phonemes, your child will learn to ‘sound out’ simple words and to blend the phonemes together to read these words.

Synthetic Phonics At first we will concentrate on simple sound to letter correspondence. This is when a phoneme is represented by a single letter as in the word /m/ /a/ /t/. Fast!

Synthetic Phonics Then we will concentrate the more difficult code such as one phoneme represented by 2 letters. sh ch qu ck ng Efficient!

Synthetic Phonics When that is mastered, your child will learn the more advanced code. This is when a single phoneme can be represented by many letters. Effective!

Here is an example. a - paper ay – play ey - hey a-e – spade eigh – eight ei – as in vein ai – as in plain

But there are some irregular, tricky words! The camera word We need to learn these my heart Not only are they high frequency but are also difficult to decode

How can you help? By pronouncing the phonemes in the correct way. See: By helping your child with “MAKE and BREAK’ activities at home. By reading quality synthetic phonics home readers every night. By filling in the Home Reading Journal every night

What your child will be learning this year s a t p i n m d g o c k ck e u r h b f ff l ll ss j v w x y z zz qu VCC/CCVC/CVCC sh ch th ng Term 1 & 2 Alongside 36 camera words

What your child will be learning this year ee ea y e i igh y ie i_e o oa ow o_e a ai ay a_e oo ew ue u_e Term 3 Alongside 36 camera words