Reading Grundisburgh Primary School aims to ensure that reading is a pleasurable experience. We know that reading underpins all areas of learning and therefore early reading and the enjoyment of reading is vital. We use a variety of phonics based books to help reinforce your child's learning such as Phonics Bug books. Once children have learnt to read they move on to Free Readers and are encouraged and guided to read a wide variety of genres at an appropriate level. Phonics In school, we follow the Letters and Sounds programme and the new English curriculum (2014). Letters and Sounds is a phonics resource published by the Department for Education and Skills which consists of six phases. The Terminology A phoneme is the smallest unit of sound in a word. It is generally accepted that most varieties of spoken English use about 44 phonemes. A grapheme is a symbol of a phoneme. It is a letter or group of letters representing a sound. Segmenting consists of breaking words down into phonemes to spell. Blending consists of building words from phonemes to read. Both skills are important. Digraph - this is when two letters come together to make a phoneme. For example, /oa/ makes the sound in ‘boat’ and is also known as a vowel digraph. There are also consonant digraphs, for example, /sh/ and /ch/. Trigraph - this is when three letters come together to make one phoneme, for example /igh/. Split digraph - a digraph in which the two letters are not adjacent – e.g. make Abbreviations - VC, CVC, and CCVC are the respective abbreviations for vowel-consonant, consonant-vowel-consonant, consonant-consonant-vowel-consonant, and are used to describe the order of graphemes in words (e.g. am (VC), Sam (CVC), slam (CCVC), or each (VC), beach (CVC), bleach (CCVC). Phase 1 Phase 1 of ‘Letters and Sounds’ concentrates on developing children's speaking and listening skills and lays the foundations for the phonic work which starts in Phase 2. The emphasis during Phase 1 is to get children attuned to the sounds around them and ready to begin developing oral blending and segmenting skills. Phase 1 is divided into seven aspects. Each aspect contains three strands: · Tuning in to sounds (auditory discrimination) · Listening and remembering sounds (auditory memory and sequencing) · Talking about sounds (developing vocabulary and language comprehension) Phase 2 In Phase 2, letters and their sounds are introduced one at a time. A set of letters is taught each week, in the following sequence. Set 1: s, a, t, p Set 2: i, n, m, d Set 3: g, o, c, k Set 4: ck, e, u, r Set 5: h, b, f, ff, l, ll, ss The children will start to learn to blend and segment to help them begin to read and spell. This starts with simple words. Words using set 1:
Words using set 1 and 2:
Words using set 1-3:
Words using set 1-4:
Words using set 1-5:
Alongside this, children are introduced to tricky words. These are the words that are irregular. This means that phonics cannot be applied to the reading and spelling of these words. The tricky words introduced in phase 2 are:
Phase 3 By the time children reach Phase 3, they will already be able to blend and segment words containing the 19 letters taught in Phase 2. Over the twelve weeks which Phase 3 is expected to last, twenty-five new graphemes are introduced (one at a time). Set 6: j, v, w, x Set 7: y, z, zz, qu Consonant digraphs: ch, sh, th, ng Vowel digraphs: ai, ee, igh, oa, oo, ar, or, ur, ow, oi, ear, air, ure, er
Tricky words:
Phase 4 By Phase 4, children will be able to represent each of 42 phonemes with a grapheme. They will blend phonemes to read CVC words and segment CVC words for spelling. They will also be able to read two syllable words that are simple. They will be able to read all the tricky words learnt so far and will be able to spell some of them. This phase consolidates all the children have learnt in the previous phases Tricky words:
Phase 5 Children will be taught new graphemes and alternative pronunciations for these graphemes, as well as graphemes they already know. They will begin to learn to choose the appropriate grapheme when spelling. New graphemes for reading:
Phase 6 In phase 6, the children are introduced to some more unusual alternative graphemes but the focus is on learning spelling rules for word endings (these are known as suffixes). The children will learn how words change when you add certain letters. For example: -s -es -ing -ed -er -est -y -tion -ful -ly -ment -ness Phonics at home
This information is available to download as a word document. Phonics for Parents Useful webpages  | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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