1. Phonics Workshop at St Leonards
Welcome and thank you for showing your support. As parents carers you remain your child’s first teacher- you spend the most time with them, you have the most influence, you have the ability to reinforce what they are taught in school- this reinforcement is particularly important when children are learning to read.
Giving chn the skill to read opens up the whole curriculum to them, without reading they couldn’t access all the other subjects we teach in school,
Guidance for parents & carers: November 2014

2. If we don’t teach children how to recognise letters and sounds systematically their whole development will be affected.
Talk about how i feel seeing pic, nervous, anxious, dont understand what it means- this is how your child will feel until we equip them with skills that they need to read and write.
We need to work together to help children learn the tools to read anything in the English language.

3. Letters & Sounds Six Phases from Pre-School to Year 2
Daily phonics sessions with a teacher or Teaching Assistant.
Some children may receive additional sessions according to their needs.

4. Some definitions A phoneme is the smallest unit of sound in a word
A grapheme is a letter or group of letters representing a single phoneme:
t ch igh
Discuss the importance of the whole school using the same language. Talk about we don’t use letter names e.g. A for a. because its not the sound the letter makes we use the phoneme sound. Explain we use jolly phonics to introduce new sounds to the chn.

5. Oral Blending & Blending & Segmenting
Oral Blending - Hearing a series of spoken sounds and merging them together to make a spoken word. No text is used.
For example, when a teacher calls out b – u – s, the children say “bus”.
This skill is usually taught before blending and reading printed words.
Blending - Recognising the letter sounds in a written word, for example c – u – p, and merging or synthesising them in the order in which they are written to pronounce the word “cup”.
Segmenting - Identifying the individual sounds in a spoken word, for example h – i – m, and writing down or manipulating letters for each sound to form the word “him”.
Stop the chn then discuss once the chn have a small bank of sounds they can begin to blend to read words. Put on flip chart mat put buttons underneath- chn to segment first then to blend for whole word. Oral blending - Importance of hearing – children need to be encouraged to recognise rhyme, alliteration etc in early years to enable them to hear single sounds in words.
Letters and Sounds – Phase 1 –refer back to pre school setting foundations for us to build upon. If they done lots of sound talk then they will segment easily.
Blending Explain that they are single phonemes because one has to change something within the mouth to enunciate each.
The technical name for these now is a constant cluster.
Letters and Sounds – phase 2 Teaching and practising blending to read – includes visual stimulus
This is the analysing bit – breaking down the word into single phonemes. Later on children learn how to segment into syllables.

6. Letters and Sounds Phase two: Reception Class
Children begin to learn the 44 sounds in the English language, starting with the phonemes.
Phonics sessions are fun sessions involving lots of speaking, listening and games
Read through the slide with parents.

8. Letters and Sounds Phase three: Reception Class
Children will learn another 25 sounds, some made up of more than one letter, eg: ‘oa’ as in boat
Your child will also learn all the letter names in the alphabet and how to form them correctly
By the end of reception chn should be secure at phase 3.

10. Letters and Sounds Phase four and five:
By Phase 4 children are able to represent each of 42 phonemes by a grapheme. Children will be able to blend and segment CVC words for reading and spelling.
Phase 4 is consolidation of children’s knowledge. Children are encouraged to practice blending for reading and segmenting for spelling of adjacent consonants.
Phase 5 children will learn the alternative pronunciations of graphemes including split digraphs.
Explain to the parents phase 5 is the biggest of all the phases and although children who make good progress should have completed ph5 by the end of y1 many will not. There are so many different variations of the same sound represented by different graphemes that lots of practice to consolidate chns knowledge is very important. Write on flipchart for example children will be taught the ie sound can be written ea, ee, ie, y, e, ey they need to be taught rules for using each variation of grapheme to help them categorise words with the same sound but different spelling.

12. Letters and Sounds
Year 1 Phonics Check
In June all Year One children will be expected to undertake a phonics check.
The aim: to check that children are making progress in phonics.
Pupils who have achieved the expected standard at the end of Year 1 will have experience of decoding all of the types of words that appear in the Year 1 phonics screening check. They will know the grapheme-phoneme correspondences and be able to blend phonemes in words with the orthographical structures that have been included in the screening check. However, pupils at the minimum expected standard will not necessarily score full marks.
In particular this means that in the screening check, a pupil working at the minimum expected standard should be able to decode:
all items with simple structures containing single letters and consonant digraphs
most items containing frequent and consistent vowel digraphs
frequent means that the vowel digraph appears often in words read by pupils in year 1
consistent means the digraph has a single or predominant phoneme correspondence
all items containing a single 2-consonant string with other single letters (i.e., CCVC or CVCC)
most items containing two 2-consonant strings and a vowel (i.e., CCVCC)
some items containing less frequent and less consistent vowel digraphs, including split digraphs
some items containing a single 3-consonant string
some items containing 2 syllables

13. KS1 Reading Comprehension: Who, What, Where, Why, When ??? Deduction
Inference
Prediction
At this point it is important that comprehension strategies are developed so that children clarify meaning, ask and answer questions about the texts they are reading, construct mental images during reading and summarise what they have read.

14. How to help at home
Reading lots of stories together, e.g. having a regular bedtime story
Singing lots of nursery rhymes and action songs
Have a go at making up some nonsense songs together!
Talking about the different sounds you hear when you are out and about

15. How to help at home
Magnetic letters - Find out which letters have been taught – have fun finding these.
Making little words together it, up, am, met, pick. As you select the letters, say them aloud: ‘a-m – am’, ‘m-e-t – met’.
Breaking words up-Robot voices: “Can you get your c-oa-t, Put on your s-o-ck” etc.
Don’t forget! - Praise, don’t criticise. Little whiteboards and pens, and magic boards, are a good way for children to try out spellings and practise their handwriting.
Make or buy an alphabet poster.
Play tricky word games e.g. fast find, pairs

16. Phonics (& reading) Websites
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