1. Starfish Class - ‘Stars in the making!’
Phonics Information
Starfish Class - ‘Stars in the making!’
Children will be introduced to letters and the sounds they make within a daily phonics sessions.
Each session your child will learn the different letters and sounds in a variety of ways. They will look at the grapheme and make the sound, learn a song and an action to help them remember the sound, they will practice forming the letter and play many reading and writing games.
The letters and the sounds which they have learnt will be sent home on Friday’s to practice at home. You will also receive a sheet which you can practice the letter formation with. For more guidance, you can see how each letter is formed on the following website:
After a few weeks your child will have enough letters to start to build words. For example you could say the word ‘cat’ and then allow your child to try and find the correct letters to build the word. You could also build words for your child to segment (break down the sounds to read the word)
Once confident with some phonics sounds your child will move onto phonics based reading books.
Definition of phonics terms you may hear your child say:
Phoneme: Phonemes are the smallest unit of speech-sounds which make up a word. 
Grapheme: Is a letter or a group of letters that represent a sound.
Diagraph: Is a two letter grapheme, where two letters represent one sound e.g. ‘sh’ for ship
Trigraph: Is a three letter grapheme where three letters represent one sound e.g. ‘igh’ as in light
Segmenting: Segmenting consists of breaking words down into their phonemes to spell words when writing.
Blending: Blending consists of building words from the phonemes to read.
If you have any worries or concerns regarding your child and phonics please come and talk to us.
Starfish Staff 