2. Foundation and Year One Phonics and Numeracy Evening

3. Sounds~Write: a linguistic phonics programme
Help your child to read and write
Sounds~Write: a linguistic phonics programme
When they start school, your children will be starting to learn one of the most useful and exciting skills – they will be learning to read and write, and that will open up a word of opportunities to them. They will use those skills to access new knowledge, to develop their creativity, and to enjoy books.
Your children will be learning using Sounds-Write, a phonics programme that is very structured and, as you will see today, very logical and good fun! In this session, I want to introduce you to some of the basic principles of Sounds-Write, and to do some of the activities that your children will be doing at school. The more you understand how we are teaching them to read and write, the better you’ll be able to support them at home.
So, why Sounds-Write?
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4. Why Sounds~Write?
Because every one of you in this room has a child who can already listen and speak.
No-one has to send their child to school to learn what comes naturally.
What doesn’t come naturally is learning to read and write.
Well, first of all because you all have a child who can already listen and speak.
All humans have been able to listen and speak for about 250,000 years. This comes naturally to us, just like crawling and walking does. You don’t have to go to school to learn to do those things. The very idea is laughable! These things come naturally to humans, we don’t need to be taught. This is what is called primary learning.
However, we do have to be taught other things, such as how our writing system works. The knowledge that needs to be taught and learnt, is called secondary learning. It needs to be taught explicitly and systematically, and that is what we are going to do, using Sounds-Write.
But first, I want to take you back to over 5000 years ago, when modern-day writing was first invented.
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5. What prompted the development of writing?
We are going back to the biblical lands of Mesopotamia and Sumeria (modern day Iraq), where the first cities sprang up.
Until about 3,000BC they used a pictographic system where words were represented by pictures.
Here’s an example. I’ll show you some pictures, see if you can understand.
(Show the next four slides, and get parents to work out what it says as they go:
I can see you (ewe)! – NOT I can see sheep! Ha ha! Always a good icebreaker!)
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10. Phoneticisation © Sounds-Write 2017
Although pictographic systems work, they can only take you so far. They are quite crude ad rudimentary.
So when simple village societies developed into larger, urban societies and, as a result, became more and more complex, there needed to be a system to keep business records, quantities of livestock, lists of workers, records of transactions in the marketplace, taxes, and so on, and as I said, a pictographic system was just too crude.
So, how was this problem solved? Through an absolutely brilliant invention: the phoneticisation of writing. This means representing every sound in the language with a squiggle on the page.
So writing as we know it was invented to represent what was said in such a way that it can be recovered more or less exactly by a reader without the intervention of the speaker.
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11. Transparent v complex codes
Física
physics
Let me bring you back to the 21st century but not here:
To Italy, Spain, or Finland.
These languages have relatively transparent codes, so that, in general, one sound is represented by one letter, and that makes is very easy to teach and learn.
For instance, in Spanish, the word for physics is Físca (phee-cee-cah, with the stress on the phee).
Each sound in the word is represented by one letter. In Spanish, there is only one way to spell the sound /f/. What about in English? How many ways are there of spelling the sound /f/ (let the audience suggest which ways you can spell the sound /f/ and give an example of a word where it is spelled like that, and write them down as they say them>
F, ff, ph, gh
SO as you can see from just this one example, English is much more complicated. It is, in fact, the most complex alphabetic language, and therefore the most difficult to learn. So that is why it has to be taught explicitly and systematically.
© Sounds-Write 2017

12. How does the English alphabet code work?
To become fluent readers and spellers children need to know:
1: Letters are used to spell individual sounds (one at a time, from left to right across the page).
2: Each sound may be spelled by one or more letters.
cat ship night weight
To become fluent readers and spellers children need to understand these concepts:
First, that our language is made up of sounds, and that letters are used to represent the individual sounds in the language. That is why the programme is called Sounds-Write. We start from the sounds, which is what the children already know, and we teach them how those sounds are spelled.
We then also teach the that each sound may be spelled with more than one letter. /k/ /a/ /t/ each sound is spelled with one letter
ship - three sounds: /sh/ /i/ /p/ - /sh/ is two letters, but it’s one sound
night – three sounds, /n/ /igh/ /t/- /igh/ is three letters, but it’s one sound
weight – three sounds, /w/ /eigh/ /t/, /eigh/ is four letters, but it’s one sound
So, you have one-letter, two-letter, three-letter and four-letter spellings.
Complex stuff for young children to learn!
When your child first start to learn to read and write, we start with one letter spellings and we only move on to more complex spellings once they are secure in the basics.
© Sounds-Write 2017

13. How does the English alphabet code work?
To become fluent readers and spellers children need to know:
3: Sounds may be written in more than one way:
play, rain, great, gate
4: Many spellings represent more than one sound.
the spelling < ea > can represent the sounds:
seat, head, break
The two other central concepts are these:
Sounds may be written in more than one way.
So in my accent of English, give there are four ways to spell the sound /ae/ : play, rain, great, gate. <you might need to change the examples depending on your accent!>
The final concept is that many spellings represent more than one sound
So the spelling < ea > can represent the sounds: seat, head, break.
© Sounds-Write 2017

14. What do we think reading is about?
What skills need to be practised and perfected to become a fluent reader?
Segmenting
Blending
Phoneme manipulation
You also need code knowledge: how to spell the sounds in the language
We are going to have a look at what these are as we do some word building, just like your child will be doing in class.
© Sounds-Write 2017

15. Let’s have a go! Word building Word reading Sound Swapping
<Now teach parents Lesson 1, call on people to come up and do what a Reception class child does, building ‘mat’ and ‘sit’, then reading the whole word, and then writing it, saying the sounds as they do.
Then do lesson 4, word building, on the board with a volunteer. Get them to read the word ‘vet’.
If there’s time, you can also introduce them to phoneme manipulation (sound swap!) by asking a volunteer to come to the board and doing three or four words from lesson 3, Unit 2, for instance>
As children do these activities, they are learning the skills and the code knowledge that will enable them to go from ‘cat’ to ‘categorisation’ 
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16. Say the sounds precisely!
When your children start to learn to read and write, we DO NOT use letter names. We just say the sounds very precisely.
Here’s an example of what we mean <play video from link>
But don’t worry if you are not very sure, soon your child will be telling you how it’s done 
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17.
Also, we strongly recommend that you do the free, online course ‘Help your child to read and write’, which has been specifically written by Sounds-Write to show parents how to help their children when using the Sounds-Write phonics programme.
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18. The course explains in a lot more detail some of what we have looked at today and gives you some step-by-step instruction on how to help your child, and how to correct mistakes if things go wrong.
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19. There are also lots of additional resources so that you can practise at home with your child.
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20. Now watch the intro video
You can show the intro video to the parents, and PLEASE, get them to sign up to the course NOW on their mobile devices.
© Sounds-Write 2017