Transcript An introduction to Letters and Sounds

An introduction to
Letters and Sounds
A six-phase teaching
programme
Phonics at Mottram St Andrew:
20 mins everyday
9.00-9.20
Key Stage 1- Letters and Sounds
Key Stage 2- elements of Letters and
Sounds and other reading and
spelling activities.
In Key Stage 2 this depends greatly
on abilities.
Terminology:
Phoneme
– a sound
in a word. A phoneme may
be represented in more
than one way – cat,
kennel, choir.
Phonemes are
represented by
graphemes.
Grapheme
–a
letter or sequence of
letters that represent a
phoneme.
A grapheme may consist
of one (t), two (kn) or
more letters (igh).
The same grapheme may
represent more than one
phoneme – me, met.
Digraph – two letters
representing one
phoneme: bath; train; ch
ur ch.
Phonological Awareness.
Segmenting – Hearing the
individual phonemes
within a word – eg – the
word crash consists of
four phonemes: c-r-a- sh.
In order to spell a word, a
child must segment it into
its phonemes and choose
a grapheme to represent
each phoneme.
Blending – Merging the
individual phonemes
together to pronounce a
word. In order to read an
unfamiliar word, a child
must recognise (sound
out) each grapheme, not
each letter (e.g. th – i-n
not t-h-i-n), and then
merge the phonemes
together to make the
word.
What is the Letters and Sounds
programme?
Letters and Sounds is a phonics resource
published by the Department for Education
and Skills in 2007.
It aims to build children's speaking and
listening skills in their own right as well as to
prepare children for learning to read by
developing their phonic knowledge and skills.
It 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.
Phase 1
(Nursery/Reception)
Activities are divided into seven
aspects, including environmental
sounds, instrumental sounds, body
sounds, rhythm and rhyme,
alliteration, voice sounds and finally
oral blending and segmenting.
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.
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
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.
On completion of this phase, children will have
learnt the "simple code", i.e. one grapheme for
each phoneme in the English language.
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
During Phase 3, the following tricky words (which can't yet
be decoded) are introduced:
he
she
we
me
be
was
you
they
all
are
my
her
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.
During Phase 4, the following tricky words (which can't yet be
decoded) are introduced:
said
have
like
so
do
some
come
were
there
little
one
when
out
what
Phase 5
Now we move on to the "complex
code".
Children learn more graphemes for
the phonemes which they already
know, plus different ways of
pronouncing the graphemes they
already know.
During Phase 5, the following tricky words (which
can't yet be decoded) are introduced:
oh
their
people
Mr
Mrs
looked
called
asked
could
Phase 6
Working on spelling, including prefixes and
suffixes, doubling and dropping letters etc.
They will be able to read many familiar
words automatically.
When they come across unfamiliar words
they will in many cases be able to decode
them quickly and quietly using their welldeveloped sounding and blending skills.
With more complex unfamiliar words they
will often be able to decode them by
sounding them out.