Phonics in Key Stage

1

• Daily 20 minute, interactive session, following Letters and Sounds.

• Children are assessed each half term and placed in different ability groups.

• From Year 1, children receive weekly spellings linked to phonics work completed in class.

Useful terms Phoneme

The sound that letters make. A phoneme represents each distinct "mouth move" a child makes in a word. For example, the word "pop" has three distinct phonemes or mouth moves: /p/ /o/ /p/. The word "chop" also has three

mouth moves, but the first is made up of two letters: /ch/.

Grapheme The written sound.

Segmenting When words are broken down into the sounds that can be heard.

For example Sat s a t The children are taught to use Robot Arms to help when segmenting.

What is Letters and Sounds?

A phonics resource published by the Department for Education

and Skills in 2007. Helps children to learn to read by developing their phonic

knowledge and skills. Sets out a detailed and systematic programme for teaching phonic skills for

children starting by the age of five, with the aim of them

becoming fluent readers by age seven.

It has 6 overlapping phases. In school, most children will start

on Phase 2.

An overview of each phase. Phase 2

Learning 19 letters of the alphabet and one sound for each. Blending sounds together to make words.

Segmenting words into their separate sounds. Beginning to read simple captions.

We use the Jolly Phonics approach where each letter has a sound and a corresponding action. This is a fun

way of learning which inspires and engages the children.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o-bZlmRw2uI

We start by learning initial sounds – getting the children to identify words that begin with each sound. To do this, we use resources such as letter bags and

games such as I Spy

We then progress onto segmenting to spell and blending to read 2 letter VC words for example it, and then 3

letter CVC words for example sat, cap. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PAbhtD5atI0

An overview of each phase. Phase 3

The remaining 7 letters of the alphabet, one sound for each. Graphemes such as ch, oo, th representing the remaining

phonemes not covered by single letters.

Reading captions, sentences and questions.

An overview of each phase. Phase 4

No new grapheme-phoneme correspondences are taught in this phase. Children learn to blend and segment longer words with

adjacent consonants, e.g. swim, clap, jump.

An overview of each phase. Phase 5

Children learn more graphemes for the phonemes which they already know, plus different ways of pronouncing the graphemes they already

know. For example they will learn ai in rain and ay in ray, ee in meet and

ea in meat.

An overview of each phase. Phase 6

Working on spelling, including prefixes and suffixes, doubling and dropping letters etc

High Frequency Words In addition to the phonics approach where children are asked to

look at the sounds in words, we also learn a range of high frequency words.

High frequency words are those words which occur most frequently in written material, for example, "and", "the",

"as" and "it". Some of the high frequency words can be sounded out using basic

phonic rules, e.g. "it" However, many of the high frequency words are not phonically

regular and are therefore hard to read in the early stages. These words are sent home of flash cards.

How do we learn? All sessions are fun and interactive, including a variety of

different activities including games and use of the interactive whiteboard.

Phonics Play http://www.phonicsplay.co.uk/Burie

dTreasure2.html

Matching captions and pictures.

Bingo

Use of magnets and whiteboards.

End of Year 1 Screening The Phonics Screening Check is

meant to show how well your child can use the phonics skills they’ve

learned up to the end of Year 1, and to identify students who need extra

phonics help.

The checks consist of 40 words and non-words that your child will be asked to read one-on-one with a

teacher. Non-words are a collection of letters that will follow phonics

rules your child has been taught, but don’t mean anything – your child will need to read these with the correct

sounds to show that they understand the phonics rules behind

them.

https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/

attachment_data/file/439254/2015_phonics_screening_che

ck_-_pupils__materials.pdf