Phonics Letters and Sounds

Helping at home

Most important thing –

• Talking and Listening.

• Reading with and to your child

• Playing listening games

• Singing songs and rhymes

• Simple movement games

PHONEME

• The smallest unit of sound in a word.

• There are 44 phonemes that we teach.

• Now 5 a week

• Each phoneme has an action

The 44 phonemes

GRAPHEME

• Written representation of sound

• A phoneme you hear

• A grapheme you see

BLENDING to read

• Recognising the letter sounds in a written word, for example

c-u-p

and merging or ‘blending’ them in the order in which they are written to pronounce the word ‘cup’

SEGMENTING to spell

• ‘Chopping Up’ the word to spell it out

• The opposite of blending

• Use your ‘ROBOT ARMS’

• Spellings

Once children are good with single phonemes…

• DIGRAPHS – 2 letters that make 1 sound

ll ss zz oa ai

• TRIGRAPHS – 3 letters that make 1 sound

igh ear

Year 1- Alternative spellings for a phoneme

Segmenting Activity

• Use your ‘robot arms’ to say how many phonemes in each word.

• shelf

• dress

• sprint

• string

Did you get it right?

• shelf = sh – e – l – f = 4 phonemes

• dress = d - r - e – ss = 4 phonemes

• sprint = s – p – r – i – n – t = 6 phonemes

• string = s – t – r – i – ng = 5 phonemes

TRICKY WORDS

• Words that are not phonically decodable

• e.g. was, the, I

• Some are ‘tricky’ to start with but will become decodable once we have learned the harder phonemes

• e.g. out, like,

Year 1

Phase 5

At phase 5 children will learn:

• to read and write all of the phase 5 phonemes

• to consolidate their recognition of all taught phonemes

• to begin to select the correct grapheme from several choices e.g. which long a grapheme; ai, a, ay

• to read and write the tricky words in this phase.

Phase 6

During Phase 6 children will consolidate their learning of all the other phases, becoming increasingly accurate with their choice of grapheme. They will also begin to look at other more unusual phonemes, graphemes and rules such as:

• When an /o/ sound follows a /w/ sound, it is frequently spelt with the letter a (e.g. was, wallet, want, wash, watch, wander) – often known as the ‘w special’. This extends to many words where the /w/ sound comes from the qu grapheme (e.g. quarrel, quantity, squad, squash).

• When an /ur/ sound follows the letter w (but not qu) it is usually spelt or (e.g. word, worm, work, worship, worth). The important exception is were.

They will learn about the past tense and the rules that apply to changing words from present to past tense.

They will also learn the rules for adding -ing, -ed, -er, -est, -ful, -ly and -y, plurals.

Strategies

1. Syllables To learn my word I can listen to how many syllables there are so I can break it into smaller bits to remember (e.g. Sep-tem-ber)

2. Base words To learn my word I can find its base word (e.g. Smiling – base smile +ing)

3. Analogy To learn my word I can use words that I already know to help me (e.g. could: would, should)

4. Mnemonics To learn my word I can make up a sentence to help me remember it (e.g. could – O U Lucky Duck; people eat orange peel like elephants)

Parental support is crucial to your child’s development.

National Literacy Strategy

Reading comprehension is related to provision of books in the home, conversations between adults and children about the content of books and articles they have read,

and a high degree of parental support and expectation for academic achievement (Snow, 1991).

http://www.bbc.co.uk/schools/parents/primary_support/

Reading with your child is vital. Research shows that it's the single most important thing you can do to help your child's education. It's best to read little and often, so try to put aside some time for it every day.

You can really help your child at home by: • Hearing your child read regularly, daily if possible but at least four times

per week. • Ensuring that your child spells words correctly once they have learnt to

spell them- even if they need to copy them initially.

Alien Words and end of YR 1 Test

Children need to decode so well that they can recognise all of the taught phonemes up to phase 5 even in nonsense words. Half of the words that children are expected to read will be alien/ nonsense words.

Sporsh Trave

Important!

We now have an excellent range of phonically decodable books. If you have seen some of these you will know that they are much harder than the traditional books that rely more heavily on contextual clues. PHONIC BUG: https://www.activelearnprimary.co.uk/login?c=0 When you are reading with or to your child, look out for the phonemes that we are learning in class. Play word games- make up your own alien names.

Useful websites

• www.parentsintouch.co.uk

• www.bbc.co.uk/schools/parents

• www.jollylearning.co.uk/

• www.focusonphonics.co.uk/ • www.syntheticphonics.com • www.phonicsplay.co.uk

• ‘Interactive Phonetic chart for English

Pronunciation’- type into ‘youtube’ for pronunciation.