1. Phonics – ‘Letters & Sounds’ How we teach Phonics at Withnell Fold Primary School

2. Teaching your child to become an effective and confident reader Under government guidelines, we use the ‘Letters and Sounds’ programme for teaching the 6 phases of phonics By end of Year 2, most children will have completed phase 6 What is Phonics?

3. An overview of the phases Phase 1: Children experiment with sounds and become familiar with rhyme, rhythm and alliteration. Phase 2: Grapheme – phoneme correspondence is introduced. The grapheme is the letter shape (what it looks like) the phoneme is the sound that it makes. Phase 3: Naming and sounding of the letters of the alphabet and digraphs are introduced – sh ai

4. Tricky High Frequency words and alien (nonsense) words Some words in English have an irregular spelling and therefore cannot be read by blending. For example was, said, one and in the later phases, little, could, water. Alien words are important to phonics teaching because once children are secure with blending, they can read any (decodable) word. The year 1 phonics check contains words like this. For example, chid cag theb

5. Continued.. Phase 4: Children are introduced to words containing adjacent consonants e.g st a r ch e st (Usually taught at the end of Foundation Stage) Phase 5: In Year 1, children are taught to recognise and use alternative ways of pronouncing and spelling the sounds they have already been taught. For example, ‘ai’ in rain is pronounced the same as ‘ay’ in play and that ‘c’ in coat can also be ‘c’ in city. Phase 6: In year 2, or when children are ready, they develop their skills already learned and are introduced to the past tense and punctuation.

6. The resources that we use In each classroom, there is now an opportunity for you to sample some of the phonics teaching. Your child’s class teacher will be happy to inform you which phase your child is working on answer any questions you may have All the information from this presentation is in a booklet for you to take home