Phonics
As a school, we know how important it is for parents and teachers to work together to give your child the best start. Reading together at home is one of the most effective and important ways in which you can help your child. Children should be encouraged to enjoy sharing books and read independently, as well as reading with an adult. This not only supports children’s progression in reading but leads to them seeing reading as a source of pleasure and interest. To support your child in becoming an effective and confident reader we hope to work with you to develop their knowledge of phonics (letter sounds) to enable them to decode different words they may come across.
Below you will find some information and activities to help with phonics at home.
In Year 1, your child will complete a phonics screening test in which they will segment and blend words - some words are 'real' words and some of these words are 'alien' words, these are words that are not real.
What is Phonics?
The alphabet contains only 26 letters. Spoken English uses about 44 sounds (phonemes). These phonemes are represented by letters (graphemes). In other words, a sound can be represented by a letter (e.g. ‘e’ or ‘p’) or a group of letters (e.g. ‘sh’ or ‘air’).
A letter consists of: a sound, a shape and it has a capital form and a lower case form. The letter sound is the first thing that children need to recognise.
Letter shape= grapheme.
Letter sound= phoneme.
To learn to read and spell children must be able to smoothly blend sounds together. Blending sounds fluidly helps to improve fluency when reading. Blending is more difficult to do with longer words so learning how to blend accurately at an early age is imperative. Showing your child how to blend is important. Remember some sounds (digraphs) are resented by two letters, such as ee or oi. Children should sound out the digraph not the individual letters (e.g. oi not o-i). Some words may also have trigraphs, three letters to represent one sound, (.e.g. h-ear or p-air.).
th- this and that
ng- a thing on a string
ai– snail in the rain
ee– what can you see?
igh– fly high
oa– goat in a boat
oo– poo at the zoo
oo– look at a book
ar– start the car
or– shut the door
ur– nurse with a purse
ow– brown cow
oi– spoil the boy
ear– hear with your ear
air– that’s not fair
ure– sure its pure
er– a better letter
ay– may I play
ou– shout it out
ie– I cried
ea– cup of tea
oy– toy for a boy
ir– whirl and twirl
ue– true blue
aw– yawn at dawn
wh– what do you want
ph- a dolphin
ew– chew the stew
oe– touch your toe
au– a haunted house
ey– cheeky monkey
a-e– make a cake
e-e– these are ee’s
i-e- nice smile
o-e– phone home
u-e– huge brute