1. Learning to read Phonics

2. What is phonics?

3. Enjoyment supports progress!
Phase 1
Learning to tune into sounds in
our environment.
Children start this in pre school through
range of games, activities, concentrated
listening and discussion.
Sound recognition + letter forms + letter sounds + understanding = fluent reading
Enjoyment supports progress!

4. Phase 2

5. Phonics jargon buster Phoneme = smallest unit of sound
Grapheme = written form of a sound
Segment = sound each sound in a word out.
Blend= say all the sounds in a word together.
Eg: c-a-t  “cat”
Digraph = two letters that make one sound (sh)
Split digraph = our old “magic e” (cake)
Trigraph = three letters make one sound (igh)
Non-decodable HFW = a word that must be learnt off by heart because it tricks us and we can’t use sounding out as a reading strategy. (said, put)
Sound Buttons = dots and dashes we write under graphemes to show how the sounds are read in a word.
Eg: crash = 4 sounds
. . . __

6. An overview of Phase 2 23 phonemes (sound units) over 5 weeks
In Phase 2, letters and their sounds are introduced one at a time. A set of letters is taught each week, in the following sequence:
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
As soon as each set of letters is introduced, children will be encouraged to use their knowledge of the letter sounds to blend and sound out words. For example, they will learn to blend the sounds s-a-t to make the word sat. They will also start learning to segment words. For example, they might be asked to find the letter sounds that make the word tap from a small selection of magnetic letters.

10. Phase 4
Children entering Phase Four will be able to represent each of 42 phonemes by a grapheme, and be able to blend phonemes to read CVC words and segment CVC words for spelling. They will have some experience in reading simple two-syllable words and captions. They will know letter names and be able to read and spell some tricky words. The purpose of this phase is to consolidate children’s knowledge of graphemes in reading and spelling words containing adjacent consonants and polysyllabic words

11. Phase 6
By the beginning of Phase Six, children should be able to read hundreds of words, doing this in three ways:
reading the words automatically if they are very familiar;
decoding them quickly and silently because their sounding and blending routine is now well established;
decoding them aloud.
Children’s spelling should be phonemically accurate, although it may still be a little
unconventional at times.
During this phase, children become fluent readers and increasingly accurate spellers

12. High Frequency Words
These words are taught alongside the sounds and reinforced in children’s spelling tasks.
There are 2 groups – decodable (it) and non-decodable (I, put). There are loads but we start with the most common.

13. Useful websites

14. Our Aim
We want to nurture a love of reading, with children developing life long reading habits and a whole school reading culture!
Please now explore the hall to see a range of activities and resources which show case how we do this!
Don’t forget – phonics is vital but the single most powerful tool to get your child reading is a bedtime story every night!