Phonics Workshop

What is phonics?

Phonics is linking letters to sounds e.g. knowing that the

sounds c-a-t can be read and written as the word cat

A phoneme is a sound

A grapheme is a letter or number of letters that represent

a phoneme (sound) e.g. the letter g represents the ‘g’

sound

A digraph (special friends) is two letters that make one

sound e.g. oo, or, oi

A trigraph is three letters that make one sound e.g. igh,

ear, air

Split Digraph is when a digraph is split by a consonant

e.g. a__e (space) i__e (hide)

How is your child taught phonics

at school? Whole class are taught a group of sounds

and letters ( phonemes and graphemes)

through interactive games, visuals,

repetition, actions, songs, various writing

and reading opportunities

Lesson format: introduce, teach, practise,

apply and assess

How is your child taught phonics

at school? Children are taught two important skills;

segmenting and blending

Segmenting (sounding it out/sound talk) is

breaking the word up into sounds e.g. c-ar, f-or-k

Blending is putting these sounds together to

read the word e.g. car, fork

3 steps: segmenting out loud, segmenting in our

heads, reading the word from sight

We can use sound buttons to help with

segmenting and blending

How is your child taught phonics

at school?

Tricky words (common irregular/exception words) are

words that are not easily decodable e.g. to, we, the

Jolly Phonics: an action and sometimes a song will

accompany the sound

Two syllable words e.g. sunset. Separate the two

syllables sun/set, sound talk and blend sun, sound talk

and blend set and then say both syllables

Alien words: are nonsense or silly words e.g. zarf, beej

Suffix: is a letter(s) that is added to a base word e.g.

‘smile’ plus suffix ‘ing’ becomes ‘smiling’.

we

How is your child taught phonics

at school? Sounds:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-

ksblMiliA8

Jolly Phonics

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SjCAAD

E04Vk

Letters & Sounds – 6 Phases

Phase 1 Nursery

- showing awareness of rhyme and alliteration

-distinguishing between sounds in the environment

and phonemes

-exploring and experimenting with sounds and

words

-beginning to orally segment and blend phonemes

Phase 2 - Reception

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

-understanding that words are constructed from

phonemes and phonemes are represented by

graphemes.

-blending for reading and segmenting for spelling

simple cvc words

-learning tricky words

Phase 3 – Reception

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

-reading and spelling a wide range of simple

words, also two syllable words

-reading and writing captions/sentences

-learning more tricky words

Phase 4 – Year 1

- Consolidation unit, no new graphemes,

reading and writing tricky words continue

- -segmenting adjacent consonants in words

and applying this in their spelling e.g. stop,

bend

- Blending adjacent consonants in words

and applying this skill when reading

unfamiliar texts

Phase 5 - Year 1

New Graphemes for reading:

ay, oy, wh, a-e, ou, ir, ph, e-e, ie, ue, ew, i-e, ea,

aw, oe, o-e, au, u-e

Alternative graphemes:

i, ow, y, o, ie, ch, c, ea, ou, g, er, u, a

-reading phonetically decodable 2/3 syllable words

-form each letter correctly

Phase 6 – Year 2

-applying phonetic skills to spell and

recognise an increasing number of complex

words

-past tense

-investigating and learning how to add

suffixes e.g. ing, ed, s, es

-apostrophes and homophones (new, knew)

Planning and Progression

Useful websites:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/schools/wordsandpictures/phonics/

http://www.ictgames.com/literacy.html

http://www.familylearning.org.uk/phonics_games.html

http://www.letters-and-sounds.com

http://phonicsplay.co.uk/

http://www.mrthorne.com/

http://www.satspapers.org.uk/Page.aspx?TId=21

(examples of past phonics screening checks)

Thank you for coming!

Any questions?