Phonics And Reading Workshop

1. Phonics And ReadingWorkshop Read Write Inc

2. Introduction • Phonics is a method of teaching children to read using letter sounds. These sounds are then blended together to read words. • All children will be at very different stages of learning to read. • First stage of phonics is for children to tune into hearing everyday sounds. • Progress to hearing the sounds that words begin with.

3. Helping Your Child At Home • Sort objects or pictures into two different sound sets. • Fred Talk helps your child to hear the separate sounds in words • E.g. I spy a p-e-g Where is your s-o-ck? Put on your h-a-t • Play games such as ‘I spy’ using letter sounds.

4. Is Phonics The Only Way ? • The majority of children do learn through phonics. • A few children have really good visual memories and can remember words after seeing them a few times. • Phonics has been a big Government initiative for the last ten years.

5. Talking the same Language Phoneme • A phoneme is the sound a letter or group of letters make. • There are 44 phonemes that are taught throughout school. • We all need to use the same language and enunciation of sounds. • Some sounds are bouncy and some are stretchy. Youtube sound pronunciation guide Ruth Miskin training

6. Grapheme • Written letters representing a phoneme e.g. c ai igh • Children need to practise recognising the grapheme and saying the phoneme that it represents.

7. Read Write Inc and Jolly Phonics • It is a lively and systematic approach. • Just seeing a symbol and being told a sound to go with it can be tricky for a child to remember. • RWI has pictures to represent each grapheme and a rhyme to help with letter formation. • Jolly Phonics has a picture, action and song. • The children enjoy it because of the lively and fun way it is taught.

10. Once children are good with single phonemes… • Greedy letter – 2 letters that are the same that make 1 sound llffsszzck • Special friends - 2 letter phonemes (digraphs) shthchqu

11. Blending • As soon as children have a small number of grapheme/phoneme correspondences, they need to start blending the phonemes together to read words. • We start with sounds m a s d t i n • Blend together easily to make short words that are easily decoded .

12. Blending • We use sound buttons to press each grapheme. Then we blend the sounds softly together . • m a t s a d t i n • m i n p i n p i t

13. Applying Skills • Children will be asked to read nonsense words. • These are used to build up phonic skills and are fun! • The Phonic test in year 1 includes nonsense words. Helps later on sounding out longer words e.g. gar – den

14. Blend these words… • drep • blom • gris Nonsense games like this help to build up skills – and are fun! Buried Treasure game.

15. Tricky Words • Words that are not phonetically decodable e.g. the, I, no, go, to, he, she, we, be, was, my, you, her, they, all, are. • They need to be learnt by sight using flashcards or read, cover, write techniques.

16. Segmenting • Hear each phoneme in the word to spell it out. • We use Fred fingers to sound out words.

17. Letter Formation • Important for your child to hold their pencil properly. Frog legs. • Letter formation needs to be correct from the start. • All letters start from the top apart from e and d. • Lower case before capitals.

18. Writing words • Start with writing their name. • Simple three letter words they can sound out e.g. sad, mat, mad. • Use sound mats to help with sounding out. • Keep checking letter formation and pencil grip. • Move on to writing labels, lists, captions and cards.

19. Writing for a purpose • They need to be able to say a sentence and remember it before they can write it. • Finger spaces. • By the end of the year, we hope that they can spell some key words correctly, eg – ‘the’, ‘we’. • For harder words such as ‘space rocket’, phonetic attempts are accepted, eg – ‘spays rokit’. • Capital letters and full stops.