Phonics Workshop

1. Phonics Workshop Letters and Sounds taught through

2. English in Reception • In Reception, phonics, writing and reading are practised daily. • The children have a short phonics session each day as part of their English lesson. • Phonics is a method of teaching children to read and write English by connecting the sounds of spoken English with the letters or groups of letters. For example, the sound ‘k’ can be represented as c, k or ck.

3. Phonics • Enjoyable and motivating for the children. • It’s a thorough foundation for reading and writing. • We use a systematic way of teaching phonics in the school, which supports “Letters and sounds”. • We use the synthetic phonicsmethod of teaching the letter sounds in a way that is fun and multi-sensory. • Children learn how to use the letter sounds to read and write words.

4. What are the key skills taught? • The five basic skills for reading and writing are: • 1. Learning the letter sounds and names • 2. Learning letter formation • 3. Blending • 4. Identifying sounds in words • 5. Tricky words • These skills are taught alongside one another.

5. Children learn the letter sounds in a fun, multi-sensory way using stories and actions. • Each sound has an action and rhyme which helps children remember the letter(s) that it represents. Learning the action for the /s/ sound: Weave your hand like a snake, making an ‘s’ shape, saying sssssssss.

6. The letter sounds

7. Digraphs • Digraphs are two letters that make one sound.

8. Alternative spellings • The alternative spellings of the vowel sounds: Introduced as: Taught later as: (rain) (feet) (leaf) (these) (boat)

9. The letter sounds • The letters are not introduced in alphabetical order. The first group (s, a, t, i, p, n) has been chosen because they make more simple three-letter words than any other six letters. The letters b and d are introduced in different groups to avoid confusion. • Sounds that have more than one way of being written are initially taught in one form only. For example, the phoneme ai(rain) is taught first, and then a-e (gate) and ay (day) follow later. • We teach the phoneme(sound) and letter name simultaneously as the letter can make its sound or name in a word. However, it is the phoneme that is used initially in blending three letters sounds to form words. E.g. c-a-t. • When we teach letter sounds, we teach the soft sound, t instead of tuh.

10. Correct Articulation of phonemes is essential! • http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BqhXUW_v-1s

11. Learning the letter formation • It is very important that a child holds their pencil and uses it effectively. The most effective way is the ‘tripod’ grip between the thumb and first two fingers. The children are using triangular pencils to help train their grip. • A child needs to form each letter the correct way. • The letter c is introduced in the early stages as this forms the basic shape of some other letters, such as d, o, g and q. • Particular problems to look for are: • the o (the pencil stroke must be anticlockwise, not clockwise), • d (the pencil starts in the middle, not the top), • there must be an initial down stroke on letters such as m and n.

12. Blending • Blending is the process of saying the individual sounds in a word and then running them together to make the word. For example, sounding out d-o-g and making dog. • Some sounds (digraphs) are represented by two letters, such as sh. Children should sound out the digraph (sh), not the individual letters (s-h). E.g. r-ai-n not r-a-i-n • When sounding out a blend, we encourage children to say the two sounds as one unit, so fl-a-g. This will lead to greater fluency when reading.

13. Blending Activities

14. Blending Harder Words Regular practice is the key to blending words with digraphs and consonant blends:

15. Identifying phonemes in words • The easiest way to know how to spell a word is to listen for the phonemes in that word. Even with the tricky words an understanding of these can help. • We start with asking children to listen for the first sound in a word, then the other sounds in order. • We ask them to listen for how many phonemes. Tapping each sound can help, e.g. c-a-t (3 taps) or f-i-sh (3 taps).

16. Independent writing • For children to write independently they needto know: • The 42 letter sounds • How to hear the sounds in words • One way of writing the letter sounds • What they want to say

17. Reading the tricky words There are several ways that we use to encourage the children to read tricky words : • Work out the “tricky” bits • Have regular flash card practice • Look, Cover, Say and Check.

18. Writing tricky words • Look, copy, cover, write and check. 2) Say it as it sounds. For example, the word was is said as ‘wass’, to rhyme with mass, the word Monday is said as ‘M-on-day’. 3) Mnemonics. The initial letter of each word in a saying gives the correct spelling of a word. For example, laugh – Laugh At Ugly Goat’s Hair. This is normally introduced in year one onwards to help with the more complicated tricky words. 4) Look at word families.

19. Technical Vocabulary • A phoneme is the smallest unit of sound in a word. A phoneme may be represented by 1, 2, 3 or 4 letters. Eg. t aiigh • A grapheme is the letter(s) representing a phoneme. Written representation of a sound which may consist of 1 or more letters eg. The phoneme ‘s’ can be represented by the grapheme s (sun), se (mouse), c (city), sc or ce(science) • A digraph is two letters, which make one sound. • A consonant digraph contains two consonants shthckll • A vowel digraph contains at least one vowel aieearoy

20. Resources we use to teach Phonics • Action and letter practice sheets (which also go home). • Jolly jingles • Puppets • DVD • Story Books • Big books • IWB • Games

21. How can you help at home? • Encouraging children to sound out the phonetic words in home readers. • Blending letters together to read and spell simple words. • Talk robotically (very slowly and deliberately) with children to split words into single sounds & digraphs – build into normal routines. • Learn letters and spellings – writing in the air, writing in chalk, magnetic letters, bath paints. Fun practical ways without always using pencil paper. • Encouraging the children to use the sound and action when reading and spelling words. • Practising letter recognition and correct formation using the laminated sheet. • And the most important thing is to make it … FUN! Little and often is the best policy.

22. Reading challenge

23. Reading • Oxford Reading Tree books – once a week • Reading challenge – beginning 9/10/17. • Children will read twice a week, either with the teacher or teaching assistant, and will bring one Oxford Reading tree book home and one reading challenge book home.

24. Activity afternoons • Later this term there will be the opportunity for you to come along to an activity afternoon, where lots of the phonics activities can be seen in action.