23 rd February 2016

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 different phases.

What is phonics? Phonics is the link between letters and the sounds they make. Using a highly structured programme working through progressive phases, children are taught: The full range of common letter/ sound correspondences. To hear separate sounds within words. To blend sounds together.

Can you read phonetically? It iz tiem too gow hoam sed v kator pilla. But iy doat wont 2 gow howm sed th butt or flie. Iy wot to staiy heyr.

S OME DEFINITIONS Phoneme – The smallest unit of sound in a word. Grapheme – What we write to represent a sound/ phoneme – for some phonemes, this could be more than one letter. e.g. t ai igh

Oral blending Hearing a series of spoken sounds and merging blending them together to make a spoken word – no text is used. For example, when children hear /b/u/s, they will say bus.

Blending Recognising the letter sounds in a written word, for example c- u- p, and blending them in the order which they are written, to read the word ‘cup’.

S EGMENTING Queen qu ee n

P HASE 2 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

P HASE 3 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

P HASE 4 This phase consolidates all the children have learnt in the previous phases.

P HASE 5 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: a_e, e_e, i_e, o_e, u_e

W HAT DOES A P HONICS LESSON LOOK LIKE ? Revisit/reviewFlashcards/Quick write to practice phonemes learnt so far. TeachTeach new phoneme air PracticeBuried treasure Air, zair, fair, hair, lair, pair, vair, sair, thair ApplyRead/ write captions: The goat had a long beard. The quack was right in his ear.

Y EAR 1 P HONICS T EST

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