Phonics and Spelling Holy Family Catholic Primary School

1. Phonics and SpellingHoly Family Catholic Primary School By Lucy Moon

2. Phonics

3. Why Phonics? The way that spelling and reading is taught in schools is as a result of the Jim Rose report. It was found that the systematic approach, which is generally understood as 'synthetic' phonics, offers the vast majority of young children the best and most direct route to becoming skilled readers and writers and that phonic work is also essential for the development of writing, especially spelling.

4. It is a requirement that reception children are taught 20 mins of letters and sounds per day.It is recommended that Year 1 and 2 children also receive 20mins per day.

5. Phonics Consists of: Identifying sounds in spoken words Recognising the common spellings of each phoneme. Blending phonemes into words for reading. Segmenting words into phonemes for spelling.

6. Segmenting (for spelling) Identifying the individual sounds in a spoken word (e.g. h-i-m , s-t-or-k) and writing down letters for each sound (phoneme) to form the word him and stork.

7. Blending (for reading) Recognising the letter sounds in a written word e.g c-u-p sh-ee-p. Merging them into the correct order to pronounce the word cup and sheep.

8. Phonics at a glance Skills of segmentation and blending Knowledge of the alphabetic code.

9. How do we teach phonics at Holy Family? • At Holy Family we use a variety of different resources in order to teach phonics these include, • The Jolly Phonics Programme – a focused interactive published phonic programme • The DCFS publication ‘Letters and Sounds’ – although not statutory, a recommended high quality phonics teaching programmes which meet the core criteria.

10. The 44 Phonemes • There are approximately 44 phonemes (sounds) in the English language Consonant Phonemes Vowel Phonemes • These phonemes are often represented by several different graphemes (letter patterns)

11. Some Definitions A Phoneme This is the smallest unit of sound in a word How many phonemes can you hear in cat? Remember you hear a phoneme

12. How many phonemes are in each of these words?

13. A grapheme These are the letters that represent the phoneme. The grapheme could be 1 letter, 2 letters or more! We refer to these as sound buttons. t ai igh Remember you see a grapheme

14. Put the sound buttons under these words

15. This is where it gets tricky! Phonemes are represented by graphemes. A grapheme can consist of 1, 2 or more letters. A phoneme can be represented/spelled in more than one way ( cat, kennel, choir) The same grapheme may represent more than one phoneme ( me, met)

16. Grapheme Key Vocabulary 2 letters making one sound ( ai, ee, oo) 3 letters making one sound ( igh , dge ) Where the two letters are not adjacent ( a-e, e-e ) • Digraph • Trigraph • Split diagraph

17. Finding out more…Useful websites http://www.bbc.co.uk/schools/ks1bitesize/literacy http://www.crickweb.co.uk http://nationalstrategies.standards.dcsf.gov.uk/node/85357 http://www.johndavies.notts.sch.uk/children/documents/44PhonemesVoiced.ppt#257,1,The%2044%20phonemes

18. Spelling

19. Is spelling important? • The use of conventional spelling in written text is unfortunately one of the means used by society to judge whether or not a person is literate. • Spelling is a public activity, it is the first thing people notice about the writing and is often incorrectly associated with intelligence. • Poor spellings skills can often lead to • embarrassment • low self esteem • frustration • pressure from adults • anxiety – which will inhibit a child’s writing, leading to ‘safe’ word choices

20. How do we learn to spell? • Precommunicative stage – the child uses letters and symbols but shows no knowledge of letter/sound correspondence • Semi – phonetic stage – the child begins to show a simple awareness of letter/sound correspondence, but this is limited and very rudimentary , i.e u for you • Phonetic stage – children at this stage show a greater awareness of letters and sounds, but will represent every speech sound that they will hear in a word, kom for come • Transistional Stage – children have a more developed phoneme/grapheme understanding and become aware of letter patterns and word structures, egul for eagle • Correct Stage – at this stage the speller is aware of spelling rules and understands other conventions of the English language i.e. plurals, prefixes, etc • Spelling is a visual skill, supported by phonic encoding - memory only comes into play when you understand how to spell the word!

21. Strategies for supporting children as spellers • In addition to supporting children in acquiring a good phonic understanding, there are a number of different strategies that we can share with children that will help them with their spelling… • Which words should we target? • Choose words that: • Will be needed often – family names, interest words, high frequency words • Words that are almost right • Can be found in other words, like old, all • Have common letter patterns, e.g like • That children want to learn - dinosaur, dancing, etc

22. Looking with the intention of remembering • Dashboard activity- describe the dashboard of your car to the person next to you… • Symbols – draw the symbol commonly used to as the ‘disabled sign’… • Draw the symbol previously used to represent British Rail…

23. If only you could have had a quick look before hand… Spelling is like this It is about transferring skills without pre-warning Poor spellers do not have the skills to do this

24. Learning spellings • “I can spell whenever, wherever” • When helping your child to learn spellings there are a number of different strategies that you can employ to help… • Really study the word – ask questions about the word, how many letters, how many are tall, have tails, does it have any double letters • Look for letter patterns – look, higher, etc • If a child always forgets a certain letter (s), rewrite writing the missing letter in a different colour or much larger – they • For younger children, ask them to over write the word or write it in the air • Write the word as many times as you can in thirty seconds (this will help with automaticity –Write the word with your eyes shut – you need to physically visualise the word before writing it • Sing the word or add actions for each letter! • Understand the word – what does it mean? • Start with words that the child knows or almost knows • Revisit the words you have been learning to spell, at the table, in the bath, etc

25. Look, cover, write, check • 'Look, Cover, Write, Check' Method is an effective way of learning unknown words. This encourages your child to 'see' and 'hear' the word, and to see for themselves if it is spelt correctly. • Look at a spelling word. • Cover the spelling word. • Visualize the covered word in the mind. • Write the word from memory. • Check what has been written with the uncovered word. • Don’t focus on the negative, look at the positives – how many did we get right? •  • l i t t a l

26. Mnemonics Mnemonics can often help children to remember tricky words that don’t follow a pattern A mnemonic is a meaningful sentence that relates to the word that should be easier than trying to learn a string of isolated letters A mnemonic could be a word associated with a word that a child can already spell

27. Special – Special People Eat Caviar In A Lamborghini • A piece of pie • Was – what a sillyspelling • L  k • There is Sugar Sugar in deSSert • You hear with your ear • Because – Big elephants Cant always understand small elephants • Make up your own mnemonics with your child – that way they will have ownership of the and they will be more personal!

28. Some useful spelling rules… There is a vowel or vowel digraph in almost every word and in every syllable If in doubt use c and not k – there is always a k before an e or I, but a c before the remaining vowels Take off the e before adding ing English words never end in an i – use a y or a v – use an e The sound of ee at the end of a word is nearly always a y Q never stands by itself it is always written as qu A silent/Magic e is always needed if the vowel before it says it’s name Plurals – words that end with an F need to be changed to ves. Words with a hissing end buzz, hiss, fox, need an es at the end I before e except after c and when making an ‘a’ sound There is no word in English that ends in full except full (thankful, graceful, etc)

29. Spelling Games Shannon’s Game – same rules as hangman, but you give every other letter starting with the first – encourages the child to think about letter patterns, may want to play with spelling lists Hangman – use topic words/interest words or spelling list words Spot the real word - make a list of words with errors that could be made when trying to learn a new word, ask the child to pick out the correct word Word searches – ‘Puzzlemaker’ a great website for making your own word search Aunt Hetty – Aunt Hetty likes things with a letter pattern in the spelling, but doesn’t like them without the letter pattern Silly Soup – list ingredients which start with the same letter/pattern that can go in the silly soup Sparkle – Start with a word and take it in turns to spell the word a letter at a time, the person who says the word sparkle after the last letter wins the word

30. Why do we need to spell…that’s what spellcheckers are for! A Little Poem Regarding Computer Spell Checkers... Eye have a spelling chequer It came with my pea sea It plainly marques four my revue Miss steaks eye can knot sea. Eye strike a key and type a word And weight four it two say Weather eye am wrong oar write It shows me strait a weigh. As soon as a mist ache is maid It nose bee fore two long And eye can put the error rite Its rare lea ever wrong. Eye have run this poem threw it I am shore your pleased two no Its letter perfect awl the weigh My chequer tolled me sew.