Phonics
Word recognition and understanding is essential to enable children to become skilled fluent readers and in Reception and Key Stage 1 great emphasis is placed on phonetical teaching and learning. These early years are crucial to establish the foundations for fluent reading, understanding and a love of literature.
In the Reception year, the children are introduced to phonics and then progress through each phase during Key Stage 1 and sometimes early Key Stage 2. We follow Letters and Sounds Programme and Jolly Phonics. The initial phonics programme teaches children each phoneme (sound) together with a song and an action to encourage memory skills. Children are then taught to blend sounds and digraphs are introduced. Using . their knowledge learned in phonic sessions, children begin to decode words (read simple cvc words e.g. cat, fish). Building on this, more complex sounds and words are introduced. We use a variety of teaching techniques and resources in our daily phonic sessions to make them fun, practical and exciting.
Glossary of key words used in phonics
CVC | Consonant-Vowel-Consonant words e.g. cat, pin |
CVCC/ CCVC |
Consonant-vowel-consonant-consonant words e.g milk, belt Consonant-consonant-vowel-consonant words e.g clap, from |
grapheme | a visual representation of a sound this can be a single letter or a group of letters. |
digraph | 2 letters making 1 sound e.g. ai, sh |
trigraph | 3 letters making 1 sound e.g. igh, air |
split digraph | when the digraph has been separated by other letters e.g. name |
blending | Blending is the skill of joining sounds together to read words. We teach the children to say the sounds and blend them together. |
segmenting | This is the opposite to blending. The children will say the individual sounds in a word to spell it. |
sound buttons |
We represent a single sound with a dot underneath and a digraph/ trigraph is represented with a line. e.g. cat tree . . . . . _ |