East Farleigh Primary School Phonics Information Meeting 19/10/15

What is phonics?  Phonics is the recommended first strategy to use when teaching children to read.  Words are made up of small units of sounds called phonemes. Phonics teaches children to be able to listen carefully and identify the phonemes that make up each word, helping children to read and spell words.  GPCs – Grapheme phoneme correspondences. A phoneme is the sound, a grapheme is how you write it down.  Blending - Children are taught to be able to blend. This is when children say the sounds that make up a word and are able to merge the sounds together until they can hear what the word is. This skill is vital in learning to read.  Segmenting - Children are also taught to segment. This is the opposite of blending. Children are able to say a word and then break it up into the phonemes that make it up. This skill is vital in being able to spell words.

A typical phonics lesson  A typical lesson will last from 15 to 20 minutes  Children are streamed into groups through Reception, Year 1 and Year 2 based on ability not age.  Lessons follow: Revisit, Review, Teach, Practise, Apply  We teach from DfE’s Letters and Sounds. This is split into six phases. By the end of Year 2 your child should have completed all six phases.

Phase One  Phase One is absolutely vital and never comes to an end.  Phase One develops children’s abilities to listen to, make, explore and talk about sounds.

Phase Two  GPCs are taught in a specific order: Set one - satp Set two - inmd Set three – gock Set four - ckckeur Set five - hbffflllss  It is extremely important to pronounce the phonemes clearly and correctly.

Phase Three  Phase Three continues in the same way as phase two and introduces more new GPCs. By the end of Phase Three your child will know one way of writing down each of the 44 phonemes in the English alphabet. Set six - jvwx Set seven - yzzzqu Consonant digraphs - chshthng Vowel digraphs - aieeighoaoo arorurowoi earairureer

Phase Four  Phase four concentrates on helping children to blend and segment words with adjacent consonants (blends) e.g. truck, help  Children with speech and language difficulties find phase four particularly difficult

Phase Five  The first four weeks of phase five introduces new GPCs as in previous ways in phase two and three. Five of these are known as split digraphs (Not Magic E) aeeeieoeue  Weeks 3 to 7 introduce the idea that some graphemes can be pronounced in more than one way, eg, chef, check and school  Weeks 8 to 30 are all about learning phonemes that have more than one spelling (see handout)

Phase Six  Phase six reinforces much of the learning from phase five but also helps children to become more fluent readers and also introduces spelling rules such as adding ed or ing

High Frequency and Tricky Words  High Frequency words (HFW) are common words that your children will come across lots. They are expected to be able to read and spell these by the end of the phase they are learning.  Tricky words are words that cannot be blended and segmented.  Phase Two HFW - is, it, in, at, and  Phase Two Tricky Words - the, to, go, no, I  Phase Three HFW - will, with, that, this, then, them, see, for, now, down, look, too  Phase Three Tricky Words - he, she, me, be, we, was, my, you, her, they, all, are  Phase Four HFW - went, it’s, from, children, just, help  Phase Four Tricky Words - said, do, so, have, like, some, come, were, there, little, one, when, out, what  Phase Five HFW - don’t, day, here, old, house, made, saw, I’m, about, came, very, by, your, make, put, time  Phase Five Tricky Words - oh, their, people, Mr, Mrs, looked, called, asked, would, should, could

Cued Articulation  In Year R we used Jane Passy’s Cued Articulation. This is a range of hand cues for teaching individual sounds in words. The hand movements are logical, representing one sound and the cue gives clues to how and where the sound is produced.  A good video to watch is:

Now it’s your turn  Phase Two jigsaw activity - matching pictures to initial sounds  Phase Three - write as many words as you can using the /sh/ /ch/ or /th/ sound  Phase Four - roll a dice, read the words that correspond with the number you have rolled  Phase Five - Treasure or Trash (on the interactive whiteboard)  Phase Six - use the sentence tiles to create silly sentences