Download - Welcome to Allfarthing Primary School
What is phonics?
Phonics is linking letters to sounds e.g. knowing that the
sounds c-a-t can be read and written as the word cat
A phoneme is a sound
A grapheme is a letter or number of letters that represent
a phoneme (sound) e.g. the letter g represents the ‘g’
sound
A digraph (special friends) is two letters that make one
sound e.g. oo, or, oi
A trigraph is three letters that make one sound e.g. igh,
ear, air
Split Digraph is when a digraph is split by a consonant
e.g. a__e (space) i__e (hide)
How is your child taught phonics
at school? Whole class are taught a group of sounds
and letters ( phonemes and graphemes)
through interactive games, visuals,
repetition, actions, songs, various writing
and reading opportunities
Lesson format: introduce, teach, practise,
apply and assess
How is your child taught phonics
at school? Children are taught two important skills;
segmenting and blending
Segmenting (sounding it out/sound talk) is
breaking the word up into sounds e.g. c-ar, f-or-k
Blending is putting these sounds together to
read the word e.g. car, fork
3 steps: segmenting out loud, segmenting in our
heads, reading the word from sight
We can use sound buttons to help with
segmenting and blending
How is your child taught phonics
at school?
Tricky words (common irregular/exception words) are
words that are not easily decodable e.g. to, we, the
Jolly Phonics: an action and sometimes a song will
accompany the sound
Two syllable words e.g. sunset. Separate the two
syllables sun/set, sound talk and blend sun, sound talk
and blend set and then say both syllables
Alien words: are nonsense or silly words e.g. zarf, beej
Suffix: is a letter(s) that is added to a base word e.g.
‘smile’ plus suffix ‘ing’ becomes ‘smiling’.
How is your child taught phonics
at school? Sounds:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-
ksblMiliA8
Jolly Phonics
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SjCAAD
E04Vk
Letters & Sounds – 6 Phases
Phase 1 Nursery
- showing awareness of rhyme and alliteration
-distinguishing between sounds in the environment
and phonemes
-exploring and experimenting with sounds and
words
-beginning to orally segment and blend phonemes
Phase 2 - Reception
Set 1: s, a, t, p
Set 2: i, n, m, d
Set 3: g, o, c, k
Set 4: ck, e, u, r
Set 5: h, b, f, ff, l, ll, ss
-understanding that words are constructed from
phonemes and phonemes are represented by
graphemes.
-blending for reading and segmenting for spelling
simple cvc words
-learning tricky words
Phase 3 – Reception
Set 6: j, v, w, x
Set 7: y, z, zz, qu
Consonant digraphs: ch, sh, th, ng
Vowel digraphs: ai, ee, igh, oa, oo, ar, or, ur, ow,
oi, ear, air, ure, er
-reading and spelling a wide range of simple
words, also two syllable words
-reading and writing captions/sentences
-learning more tricky words
Phase 4 – Year 1
- Consolidation unit, no new graphemes,
reading and writing tricky words continue
- -segmenting adjacent consonants in words
and applying this in their spelling e.g. stop,
bend
- Blending adjacent consonants in words
and applying this skill when reading
unfamiliar texts
Phase 5 - Year 1
New Graphemes for reading:
ay, oy, wh, a-e, ou, ir, ph, e-e, ie, ue, ew, i-e, ea,
aw, oe, o-e, au, u-e
Alternative graphemes:
i, ow, y, o, ie, ch, c, ea, ou, g, er, u, a
-reading phonetically decodable 2/3 syllable words
-form each letter correctly
Phase 6 – Year 2
-applying phonetic skills to spell and
recognise an increasing number of complex
words
-past tense
-investigating and learning how to add
suffixes e.g. ing, ed, s, es
-apostrophes and homophones (new, knew)
Useful websites:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/schools/wordsandpictures/phonics/
http://www.ictgames.com/literacy.html
http://www.familylearning.org.uk/phonics_games.html
http://www.letters-and-sounds.com
http://phonicsplay.co.uk/
http://www.mrthorne.com/
http://www.satspapers.org.uk/Page.aspx?TId=21
(examples of past phonics screening checks)