Supporting your child with phonics and Early reading A guide to understanding how children learn phonics.

What is Phonics? There have been many changes to the way we teach reading in UK schools. Phonics is recommended as the first strategy that children should be taught in helping them learn to read. It runs alongside other teaching methods such as Guided Reading and Shared Reading to help children develop all the other vital reading skills and hopefully give them a real love of reading. Words are made up from small units of sound called phonemes. Phonics teaches children to be able to listen carefully and identify the phonemes that make up each word. This helps children to learn to read words and to spell words.

What is Synthetic Phonics? Alphabetic Code – The English language makes it harder to learn phonics because there are so many ways of combining letters (graphemes) together to create sounds (phonemes). We have 26 letters of the alphabet which can create 44 phonemes but there are over 120 graphemes or ways of writing down these 44 phonemes. These are called grapheme phoneme correspondences. Segmenting – children are taught to say a word and break it up into the phonemes they can hear in the word. Blending – children say the sounds that make up a word and merge them together to make that sound. Phoneme = sound Grapheme = written

Teaching phonics Enunciation Daily Phonics Phonics lesson Say sounds clearly and precisely Don’t ‘schwah’! H – e - n Huh – eh - nuh Enunciation 15-20 minutes Sounds taught in particular order Follows a sequence within the lesson Daily Phonics Revisit & Review – look at previous GPCs learnt Teach – teach a new letter, teach blending and/or segmentation with letters, teach one or 2 tricky words Practise - practise reading and/or spelling words with the new letter. Apply - read or write caption using 1 or more high-frequency words and words containing the new letter. Phonics lesson

Some definitions Phoneme = the smallest unit of sound. c a t r ai n s l ee p Grapheme= the way the sound is written. ai ay eigh a a_e rain day eight today make

Some definitions Digraph= two letters making one sound. A consonant digraph contains two consonants sh ck th ll A vowel digraph contains at least one vowel ee ay ea oo Trigraph= three letters making one sound. igh dge Split digraph= grapheme split between a letter in a word like

Letters & Sounds Phase One: Aspects Environmental Sounds Instrumental Sounds Body Percussion Rhythm and Rhyme Alliteration Voice Sounds Oral Blending and Segmenting Phase Two To introduce GPCs. (about 6 weeks, from about 5 years of age) Only a few letters. Starts with s a t p i n m d, then secure blending /segmenting if needed Phase Three To teach children one grapheme for each of the 44 phonemes in order to read and spell simple regular words. (about 12 weeks) Phase Four To teach children to read and spell words containing adjacent consonant s (about 6 weeks) Phase Five To teach children to recognise and use alternative ways of pronouncing the graphemes and spelling the phonemes already taught. eg: rain, play, make, bead, head Phase Six The shift from phonics to reading to meaning, as children become more fluent. The aim is to develop “automaticity” Reading & Spelling – Application of spelling in writing and knowledge of the spelling system

- - + + Good language comprehension, poor word recognition Good word recognition, good language comprehension Word Recognition - + Word recognition Poor word recognition, poor language comprehension Good word recognition, poor language comprehension - Language comprehension 8

Good language comprehension, poor word recognition He can tell me all about the story using the pictures, and tell me which character he likes, but if I just point to a word at random, he can’t read it. I keep telling his teacher his home reading books are too easy – he can read every word. He doesn’t like to talk about the story, though. Good word recognition, poor language comprehension

Alone we can do so little. Together we can do so much.