Welcome to our phonics and reading workshop

1. Welcometo our phonics and reading workshop

2. Purpose of the session To understand the importance of phonics. To get an idea of how phonics and reading is taught in school. To understand the progression through phonic phases and how to support and develop children’s learning. What can I do at home?

3. Reading – where do we start?

4. Why do we teach phonics? “Synthetic phonics offers the vast majority of young children the best and most direct route to becoming skilled readers and writers” Sir Jim Rose, Rose Review of Reading 2006 Synthetic phonics is simply the ability to convert a letter or letter group into sounds that are then blended together into a word. We follow the Twinkl Phonics Scheme at GSA.

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. • The letter sound is the first thing that children need to recognise. • Use lower case letters for all writing. • Only use capital letters for names, and when children are ready at the beginning of sentences. • A letter consists of; a sound, a shape and it has a capital form and a lower case form.

6. Terminology Phoneme- It’s a unit of sound. How many sounds in cat? c a t Grapheme – is a symbol of a phoneme, that is, a letter or group of letters representing a sound. How it looks on paper! Digraph -is a two-letter grapheme where two letters represent one sound such as ‘ea’ in seat and ‘sh’ in ship. A split digraph - has a letter that splits, ie. comes between, the two letters in the digraph, as in make and take, where ‘k’separates the digraph ‘ae’ which in both words represents the phoneme /ai/. There are six split digraphs in English spelling:‘a-e’, ‘e-e’, ‘i-e’, ‘o-e’, ‘u-e’, ‘y-e’, as in make, scene, like, bone, cube, type. Tri-graph-is a three-letter grapheme where three letters represent one phoneme (eg. ‘eau’ in bureau, and ‘igh’ in night). Segmenting and blending - are reversible key phonic skills. Segmenting consists of breaking words down into phonemes to spell. Blending consists of building words from phonemes to read. Both skills are important.

7. What is Segmenting?‘Chopping Up’ the word to spell it out Cat c a t

8. Queen qu ee n

9. What is Blending? Recognising the letter sounds in a written word, for example c-u-p and merging or ‘blending’ them in the order in which they are written to pronounce the word ‘cup’

10. Building words from phonemes to read. c a t cat

11. Qu ee n queen

12. Segment and Blend these words… drep blom gris Nonsense games like this help to build up skills – and are fun! See websites such as ‘Phonics play’ to make it in to a game.

13. Once children have learnt single phonemes… Digraphs – 2 letters that make 1 sound ll ss zz oa ai Trigraphs – 3 letters that make 1 sound igh Split digraphs - 2 vowels with a consonant in between. Used to be known as the magic e! spine - i_ewave – a_e hope – o_e

14. What are tricky Words? Words that are not phonically decodeable was the I Some are ‘tricky’ to start with but will become decodeable once we have learned the harder phonemes out there We teach a tricky word each week

15. Letters and Sounds is divided into six phases, with each phase building on the skills and knowledge of previous learning. Children have time to practise and rapidly expand their ability to read and spell words. They are also taught to read and spell ‘tricky words’, which are words with spellings that are unusual. We teach phases 1-4 in Foundation.

16. Phase 1 - ongoing • To develop language and increase vocabulary through speaking and listening activities. • To develop phonological awareness. • To distinguish between sounds. • To speak clearly and audibly with confidence and control. • To become familiar with rhyme, rhythm and alliteration. • Use sound talk to segment words into phonemes.

17. Phase 2 • In this phase children will continue practising what they have learned from phase 1, including ‘sound-talk’. They will also be taught the phonemes (sounds) for a number of graphemes (letters), which phoneme is represented by which grapheme and that a phoneme can be represented by more than one letter, for example, /sh/ as insh- o -p.They may be using pictures or hand movements to help them remember these. • VC and CVC words (Vowel Consonant – an, Consonant Vowel Consonant – dog)

18. Phase 2 sounds • We sing songs to help us to remember and we learn actions to go with each sound.

19. Phase 2 tricky words • I • No • Go • to • The • into

20. Phase 3 The purpose of this phase is to: • teach more graphemes, most of which are made of two letters, for example, ‘oa’ as in boat • practise blending and segmenting a wider set of CVC words, for example, fizz, chip, sheep, light • learn all letter names and begin to form them correctly • read more tricky words and begin to spell some of them • read and write words in phrases and sentences.

21. Phase 3 Sounds • 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

22. Phase 3 Tricky words • He • She • We • Me • Be • Was • You • They • All • Are • My • Her

23. Phase 4 This phase consolidates all the children have learnt in the previous phases. Children now have the ability to blend and segment therefore they are moving beyond simple cvc words to cvcc, ccvc, ccvcc and cccvc. b l a ck s t r o ng f e l t c c v c c c c v c c v c c b l a n k c c v c c

24. Phase 4 – Tricky words • Said • Have • Like • So • Do • Some • Come • Were • There • Little • One • When • Out • what

25. Lesson format • In each year group, phonic lessons follow the same format: • Revise:The children will revise previous learning. • Teach:New phonemes or high frequency or tricky words will be taught. • Practice:The children will practise the new learning by reading and/or writing the words. • Apply:The children will apply their new learning by reading or writing sentences.

26. Resources http://www.phonicsplay.co.uk

27. How can you help at home? • Play lots of sound and listening games with your child, such as ‘I Spy’ and sing the alphabet song together. • Play with magnetic letters. • Read as much as possible to and with your child. • Find sounds in the environment. • Encourage and praise – get them to have a ‘good guess’. Most importantly – enjoy reading. • Remember that not all children use phonics as their mainstrategy to read.