Helping your child with Phonics

What is phonics?

Norton Free

Church of England

Primary School –

PHONICS -

A Guide for

parents.

A Short Guide

Helping your child with 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’;

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 in learning to read.

Why phonics?

Research shows that when phonics is taught in a structured way - starting with the easiest sounds and progressing through to the most complex – it is the most effective way of teaching young children to read.

Almost all children who receive good teaching of phonics will learn the skills they need to tackle new words.

Reading is a complex skill. Throughout the booklet, this picture is shown

alongside tips for parents and carers.

Helping your child with Phonics

Phonics is one of the strategies, not the only strategy, that we use

with the children when they are learning to read.

Reading words by

sight.

Knowing what

comes next

because of the

understanding of

the grammar of a

sentence; how

we put words

together.

Using the pictures and

what is happening in

the story to work out

the word.

Blending sounds together to

make words e.g. “sh-o-p…shop”

Helping your child with Phonics

The Phonics Phases

Phonics is taught in specific phases which progress from pre-school

learning through to year 2.

Children move from one phase to the next once they are secure

in the learning at each phase.

Some children may still require phonics teaching beyond Y2.

Some children may require repetition of certain phases or parts

of phases.

Phase Phonic Knowledge and Skills

Phase One

Taught in Nursery

- develop listening skills through activities involving rhythm and rhyme, body sounds, instrument sounds.

- Orally blending sounds; knowing that c-a-t says ‘cat’ by listening to the sounds said separately.

Phase Two - Learning 19 letters of the alphabet and one sound for each.

- Blending sounds together to make words.

- Segmenting (breaking up words into separate sounds to spell).

- Separate sounds.

- Beginning to read simple captions.

- Reading the first tricky words

Phase Three - The remaining 7 letters of the alphabet, one sound for each.

- Graphemes such as ch, oo, th, ai, ee representing the remaining phonemes not covered by single letters.

- Reading captions, sentences and questions.

- Reading and writing the next set of tricky words

Phase Four - Blend and segment longer words with adjacent consonants, e.g. swim, clap, jump.

Phase Five - Alternative spelling for the same phoneme e.g. ai, ay, a_e

- Alternative pronunciations for known graphemes e.g. c=’ck’, c=’s’ as in circle.

Phase Six - Working on spelling, including prefixes and suffixes, doubling and dropping letters etc.

Helping your child with Phonics

What skills do children need to gain?

Recognising the graphemes – by sight

Recognising the graphemes – in words

cloud rain Blending the phonemes to read words

This means ‘pushing’ the sounds together – saying them out

loud to read the word.

e.g. saying ‘c – a – t – cat’. ‘p-l-ay – play’. ‘sh-ar-p – sharp’.

- to ensure secure learning of all the graphemes, we use real

and made up words.

e.g. bim, vap, thazz.

I can look at the graphemes

and say the correct sounds.

I can identify known

graphemes in words

and then sound out the

whole word.

Helping your child with Phonics

- Make flashcards with all the graphemes on as

and when they are introduced in school.

- Encourage children to find the graphemes in

books and environmental print (e.g. road signs, food labels

etc).

- Make the graphemes using magnetic letters / foam letters

in the bath.

- Make words up using each week’s new graphemes – see if

your child can identify the sound then blend it to read the

word.

Helping your child with Phonics

Writing the Graphemes.

We practise writing the graphemes in isolation and within

the context of words.

At Norton Free we use a cursive font. This means all the

letters start on the line:-

a b c d e f g h i j k l

m n o p q r s t u v

w x y z

Research has shown that the brain remembers the shape of the

letters and spelling patterns more easily when this type of font

is used. This is particularly helpful for graphemes that use more

than one letter:-

ch ar sh or th ur ai

ng ure er air ear

oo igh oa ee aw oi

It is helpful to practise writing lots of different words using the learnt graphemes so that children can practise using them in context. We do this using grapheme frames:-

Helping your child with Phonics

We also write sentences using the taught

graphemes in order that children can put these

into context.

e.g. Mark got wet on the farm.

It is really important that children feel like they can ‘have a go’ at

writing words on their own. Encourage your child to sound out words

to spell – the focus should be on the spelling being ‘phonetically

accurate’ (it looks like it sounds. For example, rain could be spelled

rayn or rane)

f ar m

- Shopping lists

- Postcards

- Thank you cards

- Sending texts and

emails

Ideas for encouraging writing:-

Helping your child with Phonics

Children love using ICT to support learning. It’s great as they don’t feel

like they are ‘working’!

Useful websites:-

www.phonicsplay.co.uk

There are some activities on this site that are free to use. There is a useful game

for reading real and made up words ‘Ob and Bob’.

APPS

There are some fantastic apps available for children to reinforce

their phonics learning. Some of them have a small charge, but are

worth it!

The following are available though apple on any iPad, iphone or

ipod touch.

Hairy letters

Twinkl phonics (select the phase)

ABC pocket phonics

Spelling shed

E –Learning

Helping your child with Phonics

The Year 1 Screening Test

- The government asks for all Year One children to undertake a phonics

screening test that takes place in June.

- The focus is on reading words. There is no writing.

- The words include real and made up words.

- The test takes approximately 10 minutes.

- The school must inform you whether or not your child has met the standard to

pass the test.

- The test will include words from phase 2-5 and gets gradually harder.

Each of the made-up words is

accompanied by a picture of a

creature.

Re-capping all the graphemes your child has learnt

regularly will help them to be prepared for tackling

unfamiliar words.

Helping your child with Phonics

Phonics terminology

Using the correct terms with children from the beginning will be useful for when

the phonics learning becomes more complex.

Phonics – a method of teaching reading by matching letters and sounds.

Phoneme – an individual sound

Grapheme – the symbol we use to write down a sound

Pure sounds – the way we pronounce the phonemes (without the uh sound). So,

for example, s is ssss as in snake, not suh.

Digraph – two letters that make one sound. For example ‘ai’ in rain and ‘sh’ in

shiver.

Trigraph – three letters that make one sound. For example ‘igh’ in light and ‘air’ in

fair.

Split digraph – two letters that make one sound where the letters are split by

another letter. For example a and e (a_e) in snake make a long a sound and they

are split by the letter k.

Phonics phases – the stages of learning phonics.

Grapheme frame – a way of showing how many phonemes there are in a word.

p u sh

Suffix – added on the end of a word. In foolish, ish is a suffix.

Prefix – added on the beginning of a word. In disappear, dis is a prefix.

Helping your child with Phonics

When writing, children can refer to this chart to help with spellings. Each column represents a

sound. As you can see, there are many options to choose from for some sounds.

f

ff

ph

l

ll

le

m

mm

mb

n

nn

kn

r

rr

wr

s

ss

se

c

ce

v

ve

z

zz

s

se

sh

ti

ci

xi

th ng

nk

b

bb

c

k

ck

ch

d

dd

g

gg

h j

g

ge

dge

p

pp

qu

t

tt

w

wh

x y ch

tch

a e

ea

i o u ay

a_e

ai

ee

y

ea

e

e_e

igh

i_e

ie

i

y

ow

o_e

oa

o

oo

u_e

ue

ew

oo ar or

oor

ore

aw

au

air

are

ir

ur

er

ou

ow

oy

oi

ure ear ure