Transcript Phonics - Sarisbury Infant School

Phonics
What is phonics?
• Phonics is a way of teaching children to read quickly and
skilfully. They are taught how to:
• Recognise the sounds that each individual letter makes;
• Identify the sounds that different combinations of letters
make - such as ‘sh’ or ‘oo’; and
• Blend these sounds together from left to right to make a
word.
• Children can then use this knowledge to ‘de-code’ new
words that they hear or see.
• This is the first important step to helping them read
Letters and Sounds
• Why Letters and Sounds?
This is the Government recommended scheme provided by
the old Primary National Strategy to support the learning of
phonics.
It is used by a large number of schools with great results.
How often, long and when?
• Your child will receive a daily phonics session lasting
approximately 10/20mins (Depending on their age).
• They will be taught by their class teacher as a whole class at the
appropriate level for the year group.
• Any child who needs additional support and requires further
consolidation of the previous sounds taught will receive a short
individual/small group session at another time in the day from
either the class teacher or one of our highly skilled LSAs.
How is it taught?
• The short lessons are fast paced and consist of four parts.
• Review and Revisit – the sounds from previous learning.
• Teach – a new sound every day
• Practise – games / word cards etc incorporating these sounds
• Apply – read or write a caption using one or more of known high
frequency words and words containing the new sounds.
• Teachers will use a range of resources and techniques including
magnetic letters, buckets of water, white boards, letter fans,
letter cards, games, robot talking and phoneme fingers, to make
the lessons fun and interactive.
What order?
• There are six phases to the programme and it is hoped that most
children will complete these whilst with us at the infant school.
• Phase One – Children are taught to hear and distinguish sounds
from their environment. They learn to hear rhyme and
alliteration (words starting with the same sound). They explore
instrumental sounds and learn to make different sounds with
their own mouths. A child needs to be proficient in these areas
before they can even begin to tune into discreet phonic sounds
which make up our language system.
• Phase Two – The first set of phonemes are introduced over a
period of 6 weeks. The order allows children to begin to
make words and segment (separate) and blend (join
together) letters after only 1 week. How many words can
you make with these letters?
s
a
t
p
i
n
• Now compare this with the first 6 letters of the alphabet.
a
b
c
d
e
f
• Phase Three – Teaches the children a further 25 sounds over
a ten week period. With these learnt a child can make a
phonically plausible attempt at any word they like as they
have been taught every sound in the English language. At
this point it does not matter that the children are not
spelling accurately. It is about having the confidence to have
a go and be successful as independent learners.
• Phase Four – Provides a four week consolidation of the
above sounds ensuring the children can read and write them
with confidence.
Phase Five – This is where the fun starts! At this point we
teach the children the alternatives and help them to learn
how to choose between the digraphs (two letters making 1
sound) so they get the spelling right. This is no easy task as
some sounds are made in many different ways. This is
because our language originates from many different
countries. Look at all these words that have the ‘ai’ sound in
them and note the spelling:
ai = pain ay = day a-e= make
Phase Six – This last phase looks more at spelling rules and
patterns and gives children a real love of words
Tricky Words or High Frequency Words
• There are many words that recur frequently in much of the
written material young children read and that they need to
write. These are taught early on as ‘Tricky’ words. The
children just need to be able to look at these and recognise
them without relying on their phonic knowledge.
• ‘the’ ‘he’ ‘want’ ‘was’
• Some terminology explained
• Robot or Fred Talk – this is when words are broken down
into each discreet sound.
• Phoneme Fingers – This is when the phonemes are counted
and the matching number of fingers are held up.
• Sound buttons or Sausages and Beans – this is when dots
and dashes are marked under a word to show knowledge of
the sounds.
• Phoneme – this is a discreet unit of sound.
• Digraph – where two letters make one sound (er, sh, ee)
• Trigraph – where three letters make one sound (igh, ear)
• Grapheme – the written form of the sound
Helping at home
• Just knowing some of this information will support you when
you are reading with your child. You will know whether or
not they are able to sound out a word or whether you should
tell them the word and help them be more confident and
fluent.
• When your child is writing at home, again you will have some
idea as to whether they can sound it out and will celebrate
with them if they have applied the right sounds even if you,
as an adult, know the spelling is incorrect.