1. Phonics Workshop for Parents
Bewick Bridge Community Primary School

2. Aims for This Session
To understand what phonics is and how it is taught at Bewick Bridge
To understand how you can help your child at home with reading
To know what the phonics screening test is

3. Aims for This Session
To understand what phonics is and how it is taught at Bewick Bridge
To understand how you can help your child at home with reading
To know what the phonics screening test is

4. Being a Successful Reader
Decoding - blending the sounds in words to read them
Comprehension - understanding what the word means within the context it appears
Two main skills

5. Why Teach Phonics?
Main strategy supporting word recognition
Teaches children to connect letters of the alphabet to the sounds they make
Supports children in identifying those individual sounds (phonemes) within words and segmenting them for spelling

6. Phonics at Bewick Bridge
In EYFS and KS1, children are engaged in learning phonics everyday for 20 minutes, following a cycle of:
Revisit, in which previous learning is revised
Teach, in which a new sound/ letter pattern is taught (show them and explain)
Practice reading and/ or spelling words with the new letter
Apply - read or write a caption with the teacher including words containing the new sound
The teaching of phonics at Bewick Bridge follows the Letters and Sounds programme of study.

7. Phonemes and Graphemes
Phoneme: the smallest unit of sound in words
Grapheme: the written symbol that represents a sound
Phonemes can be represented by graphemes of one, two or three letters
e.g. t sh igh

8. Blending
Recognising the letter sounds in a written word, for example c-a-t, and blending them to pronounce the word

9. Segmenting
‘Chopping Up’ the word to spell it out
The opposite of blending

10. Activity Try these sounds with the person next to you:sh i ai
igh r

11. Tricky Words
These are words that have to be taught through repeated revision. The children need to learn these by sight as they cannot be read using phonics.

12. Tricky Words or Decodable Words?
sit
the
frog
they
log to he do
Why? Justify your answer

13. Aims for This Session
To understand what phonics is and how it is taught at Bewick Bridge
To understand how you can help your child at home with reading
To know what the phonics screening test is

14. The books that might come home
Just sounds
Fully decodable
Decode and develop - 70% decodable and 30% tricky or high frequency words
Richer reading - not written to be decodable

15. The Importance of Reading at Home
Reading to children at age 5 every day has a significant positive effect on their reading skills and cognitive skills later in life.
Reading to children 3-5 days per week (compared to 2 or less) has the same effect on the child’s reading skills at age 5 as being six months older.
Reading to them 6-7 days per week has the same effect as being almost 12 months older.
By the univeristy of Melbourne

16. Phonics Support at Home
There is no charge for this site, though you need to register your details to sign up.
- there are phonics games for different phases. You could direct parents to particular phases.
Geraldine`s phonics You Tube videos - (Google ‘Geraldine the giraffe’)
Mr Thorne's phonics -
- a good selection of games, including Forest Phonics ( and Look cover write check (
- You can listen to stories and play games on this site. It links to the BBC television channel Cbeebies. The Alphablocks games are good for learning how to say and spell words.
– the letters and sounds; words and spelling; and learning to read sections may also be useful.
- you need to register for an account, but it is free. And then you can search by Oxford reading tree book level or Letters and Sounds Phase - there are some good games/ activities with the books too.
Visit Oxford Owl for Home, a website packed with a range of free resources and advice on how to support your child throughout their time at primary school
recommended books, how to support the learning of phonics, what they will be learning at school and how, games to play at home to support the development of reading skills and more, all organised into age ranges so you can easily find the support you are looking for
a free ebook library that can be read at home
Show parents how to find this information on school website

17. Aims for This Session
To understand what phonics is and how it is taught at Bewick Bridge
To understand how you can help your child at home with reading
To know what the phonics screening test is

18. Phonics Screening Check
The phonics screening check is used to find out whether pupils have learnt phonic decoding to an appropriate standard. It will identify pupils who need extra help to improve their decoding skills.
The check consists of 20 real words and 20 fake words that a pupil reads aloud to the teacher.
All pupils who have reached the end of year 1 must take the check.
Pupils in year 2 must also take the check if they:
didn’t meet the required standard in year 1
haven’t taken it before
If a pupil didn’t take the check in year 1 or year 2, or if they still did not meet the standard of the check in year 2, they don’t need to be considered for the check in future years. However, these pupils will continue to receive support in phonics.

19. Phonics Screening Check