1. Parent’s Guide to Phonics
Improve your understanding of how we teach Phonics to help your child excel at reading and writing! 

2. How many of the 44 sounds do you know?
Think of 1 letter 1 sound!
Thinks of 2 letters 1 sound!
Do you know any split digraphs?
Quick audit – share 44 phonemes

3. Aims of the workshop: To give an overview of Synthetic phonics
To share the associated terminology
To inform how we teach Phonics using Letters and Sounds
To learn how to correctly articulate the phonemes
To familiarise ourselves with graphemes and alternative graphemes for phonemes
To share an overview of the 6 Phases
To understand the importance of Phonics in improving children’s ability to read and write

4. What is Phonics? Phonics is… Skills of segmentation and blending
Knowledge of the alphabetic code
Could do activity of - make the words you can with different ways of saying /ae/ – how many words are there?

5. Phonemes and graphemes
01/05/08
Phonemes and graphemes
Terminology
phoneme
smallest unit of sound in a word
grapheme
a letter or sequence of
letters that represents
a phoneme

6. Enunciation
Teaching phonics requires a technical skill in enunciation.
Phonemes should be articulated clearly and precisely.
Get delegates to find any letters which can be done in an elongated fashion!!
Illustrate this for consultants – for example demonstrate how most consonants should be pronounced in a continuous manner – e.g. ssssss mmmmmm llllllll nnnnnn shshshsh rrrrrrr zzzzzzzz vvvvvvv
Some can’t be said like this (e.g. /c/ /t/ /p/ /b/ /d/ and /g/) but /c/, /t/ and /p/ should be enunciated without the voice.
Phonemes wwwwww and yyyyyyyy are not easy but can be attempted.
Cannot overestimate the importance of this – many errors spring from incorrect enunciation e.g. teachers reporting that children confuse ‘ch’ and ‘tr’. If the ‘ch’ is enunciated correctly, as one phoneme, rather than ‘chur’and ‘tr’ clearly as 2, there is far less likelihood of confusion.
Note for presenters. Regional pronunciation issues, in case these are raised by consultants. The PNS line as expressed in a position paper on teaching phonics is
Many of the sounds (particularly vowel sounds) can vary slightly according to accent, but they are generally consistent within the speech of an individual and recognisable by others who may pronounce them slightly differently.

7. Pronouncing Phonemes 1. f l m n r s sh v th z 2. c p t ch h
3. b d g w qu y j
Simple and complex charts
DVD - Phase 4 Articulation
1 = continuous
2 = unvoiced
3 = is voiced - put finger on voice box to check
Activity
a )delegates work individually, trying them out.
b) Flash cards to each group to try out the sounds.
Sue’s Phoneme/ Grapheme Charts
c) Creating a musical score of phonemes for someone else to follow.
DVD – articulation phase 4

8. Phonic Articulation DVD Phase 2 : Articulating Phonemes
Once all delegates have listened and watched ‘Phase 2: Articulating Phonemes’ of DVD then articulate together as a group before practising with talk partners.

9. Simple Speed Sounds
These are our new Phoneme and Grapheme Correspondence Charts as devised by Ruth Miskin 
JH to model all sounds as seen on chart and explain use of terms ‘bouncy’ and ‘stretchy’.

10. Complex Speed Sounds
Go through phonemes and show alternative graphemes.

11. Blending and Segmentation
01/05/08
Blending and Segmentation
Blending
Merging the individual phonemes together to pronounce a word.
To read unfamiliar words a child must recognise (sound out) each grapheme, not each letter, then merge the phonemes together to make a word.
Segmentation
Hear and say the individual phonemes within words.
In order to spell, children need to segment a word into its component phonemes and choose a grapheme to represent each phoneme.

12. Oral segmenting & blending
Watch Time: Phase 2
Oral segmenting & blending
Watch Oral blending & segmenting of DVD Phase 2

13. 01/05/08
Key Terminology
Digraph Two letters, which make one phoneme. A consonant digraph contains 2 consonants: sh ck th ll A vowel digraph contains at least one vowel: ai ee ar oy
Consonant digraphs are not identified as, in CVC words.
Ship is ‘digraph vowel consonant’ CVC.
Church is ‘consonant digraph vowel consonant digraph’ CVC.

14. 01/05/08
Key Terminology
Trigraph Three letters, which make one phoneme. igh dge

15. 01/05/08
Key Terminology
Split digraph A digraph in which the two letters are not adjacent – e.g. ‘make’.

16. How to use sound buttons
How do sound buttons help children with segmenting and blending?
Sing/ thing/ throw/ bird/ bee/ bench/ chicken/ green/ snail/ fight/ bear/ fuzz/

17. Segmenting Practise hop hope think string sprint shelf WORD PHONEMES
Point out that there is a single final ‘l’, ‘f’, ‘k’ after a consonant (these letters only double after a short vowel).
Another common mistake is to include non CCVCs/CVCCs in work on adjacent consonants. These are words which are too difficult for children to blend and segment at this stage, as they contain phoneme-grapheme correspondences they haven’t yet learned. E.g..
Refer to P74 to go through things like ‘ear’

18. 01/05/08
Consonant Digraphs
ll ss ff zz hill, mess, puff, fizz sh ch th wh ship, chat, thin, whip ng qu ck sing, quick
…therefore these are CVC words containing consonant digraphs.
CVC refers to phonemes not letters.
The above are CVC words containing consonant digraphs.
Therefore
duck is a CVC word /d/ /u/ /ck/
chip is a CVC word /ch/ /i/ /p/
Sheep is a CVC word /sh/ee/p/ 18

19. Examples of CCVC, CVCC, CCCVC and CCVCC
01/05/08
Examples of CCVC, CVCC, CCCVC and CCVCC
b l a ck s t r ea m c c v c c c c v c f ou n d b l a n k c v c c c c v c c
ACTIVITY
Consider with reference to the above slide, what could be the most common errors practitioners may make when blending and segmenting these words.
Synthetic phonics focuses on the smallest units of sound in a word.
There are usually 2 or 3 phonemes within a number of consecutive (adjacent) consonants.
e.g. strap contains five phonemes /s/ /t/ /r/ /a/ /p/
‘Str’ is not a phoneme
‘Ap’ is not a phoneme
Children need to be taught to blend and segment these phonemes within CCVC and CVCC words.
Teachers should not be teaching ‘sl’, ‘sm’, ‘sn’ etc as units of sound which need to be learned individually – this takes far too long, is unnecessary and doesn’t improve children’s spelling and reading skills as quickly.
The key here is applying the generic skill of blending to the phonemes in the word (using the taught knowledge of sound-spelling correspondences), from left to right in the order in which they are recorded in the word. 19

20. CVCC oral segmentation and spelling
Watch Time: Phase 4
CVCC oral segmentation and spelling

21. Model for daily teaching of phonics skills and knowledge
01/05/08
Model for daily teaching of phonics skills and knowledge
REVISIT AND REVIEW
recently and previously learned phoneme-grapheme correspondences, and blending and segmenting skills as appropriate
TEACH
new phoneme-grapheme correspondences; skills of blending and segmenting
PRACTISE
Cyclic for a reason. What are the benefits to this cycle? Discuss as a group.
new phoneme-grapheme correspondences; skills of blending and segmenting
APPLY
new knowledge and skills while reading/writing

22. Teaching of Tricky Words
Tricky words otherwise referrred to as high frequency words or sight words are those common words that children need for reading and writing that cannot be decoded e.g. said sounded out is s/e/d.
Phase 3: Practising & Teaching ‘tricky’ words

23. Jolly Songs & Actions
The ‘Jolly Phonics’ knowledge children have from their Reception years is being built upon also with some teaching materials used; notably the Jolly songs and actions.

24. Year 1 Phonics Screening Check
All Year 1 pupils will undertake the screening check in June 2014.
It is an oral check of their ability to segment and blend as well as identify the correct graphemes they have been taught.
Any Year 2 children who failed to meet the pass mark of 32/40 last June will retake the check.
Delegates in talk partners to discuss before feedback

25. Any questions…
Please feel free to ask anything that I have failed to outline or that you wish for more clarification on 