Transcript Slide 1

Phonics – ‘Letters &
Sounds’
How we teach Phonics at
Withnell Fold Primary
School
What is Phonics?
 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
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
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

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.
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