Phonics Guidance at St. Anthony’s: A Parent's Guide to Phonics Education

1. Phonics at St. Anthony’s School for Boys November 2016

2. Aims • To share how phonics is taught at St. Anthony’s. • To develop your confidence in helping your children with phonics. • To teach the basics of phonics and some useful phonic terms. • To show examples of activities and resources we use to teach phonics in class.

3. Synthetic Phonics • We use an approach called Synthetic Phonics. • The boys are taught to read letters or groups of letters by saying the sounds (phonemes) they represent. • They are taught that the letter __ sounds like __ when we say it. • They can then start to read words by blending (synthesising) the sounds together to make a word. • http://mrthorne.com/home/phonics/introduction/

4. St Anthony’s Phonics Scheme • Every day the boys have a 20 minute session of phonics. • The boys learn 2 sounds a week with time for revision at the end of each term. • Each sound we teach is supported by a short alliterative sentence and an action. • Please encourage your son to learn the action to each sound.

5. Phonics Words Phoneme: Sounds that can be heard in words. e.g. c - a – t Digraph:A phoneme compromising of two letters. e.g. ll, ff, ch, sh

6. Enunciation • Each phoneme should be articulated clearly and precisely. • The boys are taught the pure sound. • Some are long, stretchy sounds for instance ‘n’ and ‘m’ and some are short, bouncy sounds like ‘t’ or ‘p’. • Do not add ‘uh’ on the end of the sounds. • http://mrthorne.com/home/phonics/introduction/

7. Blending • Children need to be able to read the separate sounds in a word and then blend them together to say the whole word. b – e – d = bed t – i – n = tin

8. Segmenting • They also need to be able to hear a word and say each sound that they hear. This is very important when it comes to writing. bed = b – e - d tin = t – i -n

9. Blending and Segmenting Games These games can be played for both blending or segmenting practise. • The Robot Game • What’s in the Box? • Mrs Browning has a Bag

10. Tricky / High Frequency Words • The boys learn some tricky / high frequency words each week. • Tricky words cannot be blended or segmented because they are irregular for instance, ‘the’ and ‘you’. It is important that the boys are able to recognise these words. • High frequency words are words which appear frequently in texts.

11. How to help at home • Challenge your son to find objects that begin with a certain sound. • Play ‘I Spy’ with phonemes not letter names. • Play blending and segmenting games. • Extend rhyming strings. • Make up silly alliterative sentences. • Make words with sound cards.

12. Phonics Videos and Games Online • Geraldine the Giraffe http://mrthorne.com/home/phonics/geraldine-the-giraffe/ • Starfall http://www.starfall.com/n/level-k/letter-a/load.htm?filter=abc • Letters and Sounds Phase 2 & 3 http://www.letters-and-sounds.com/phase-2-games.html