Phonics information evening

1. Phonics information evening Organisation Segmenting and blending Reading Writing

2. Organisation • Phonics teaching is split into phases • Phase 1 (developing oral strategies) • Phase 2 (learning 23 sounds) • Phase 3 (learning 27 sounds) • Phase 4 (CCVC words) • Phase 5 (learning alternative vowel spellings) • Phase 6 (learning suffixes, writing words in different tenses and plurals)

3. Phase 1 The children start on this phase at the beginning of the autumn term. It includes: • developing their listening skills and discriminating between different sounds; • oral segmenting – splitting a word into the individual sounds; • oral blending – putting sounds together to make a word.

4. Some Examples of Phase 1 games

5. Phase 2 • We start to link a sound to a written letter or letters. This is the phoneme – grapheme correspondence: • Phoneme = sound; • Grapheme = written representation of the sound.

6. The sounds are learned in this order: • s, a, t, p; • i, n, m, d; • g, o, c, k; • ck, e, u, r; • h, b, f, ff; • l, ll, ss; • We learn the sounds using a multi-sensory approach; • We use the Jolly Phonics actions and songs • Importantly, we learn soft sounds

8. We practise these words frequently , encouraging children to develop a sight vocabulary to help their reading become more fluent; • Tricky words in Phase 2 are: I, no, go, to, the, into.

9. Examples of Phase 2 Activities

10. Internet games • Phonics Play http://www.phonicsplay.co.uk/ • Phoneme pop http://www.ictgames.com/phonemePopLS_v2.html • Torrisholme School http://www.torrisholme.lancs.sch.uk/

11. High frequency words • We teach high frequency words in all of the phases of the phonics scheme; • They consist of words that can be sounded out (decodable) and those that have parts that do not follow the sounds learnt (tricky words);

12. We practise these words frequently encouraging children to develop a sight vocabulary to help their reading become more fluent. • Tricky words in Phase 2 are: I, no, go, to, the, into.

13. Phase 3 • In phase 3 the sounds we learn are represented by single letters and 2 or 3 letters, e.g. ee, ow, igh; • We continue to practise blending and segmenting for reading and writing; • Sounds represented by two letters are a digraph and sounds represented by three letters are a trigraph.

14. The sounds are learnt in this order: • j, v, w, x; • y, z, zz, qu; • sh, ch, th, ng; • ai, ee, long oo ( as in zoom, boot), and short oo (as in book, look); • oa, ar, or, igh; • ur (e.g. fur), ow, oi, ear (e.g. ear, dear, fear); • er, air (e.g.fair, pair), ure (e.g. sure, cure).

15. We learn to read the tricky words: • we, me, be, he, she; • are, was, my, they, all. We learn to write the tricky words: I, no, go, to, the

16. Some Examples of Phase 3 Activities

17. Phase 4 • No new sounds are learned in this phase; • Lots of practise using sounds already learned and writing longer words; • This involves hearing sounds that are quiet when next to each other, e.g. st, bl, fr; • For example in: stamp, black, fresh.

18. We learn to read the tricky words: • said, so, have, like, some, come, were, there, little, one, do, when, out*, what; • * Out is a tricky word in Phase 4 as the ‘ou’ digraph has not been taught yet. • We learn to write: • we, me, be, he, she, are, was, my, they, all.

19. Phase 5 and 6 are taught in key Stage 1. • Phase 5 involves learning alternative vowel spellings, e.g. ee, ea and learning that a grapheme such as ‘ea’ can have different sounds such as the ‘ea’ in tea and bread. • Phase 6 involves learning about different tenses, adding endings to word like ‘ed’, ing, writing plurals ‘s/es’ and irregular tenses.

20. Any Questions