What is phonics?
Phonics is a way of teaching children how to read and write.
Phonics involves matching the sounds of spoken English with individual letters or groups of letters.
Teaching children to blend the sounds of letters together helps them decode unfamiliar or unknown words by sounding them out.
Why is phonics so important?
Once children can decode words effortlessly to read, they can focus their attention on their understanding and enjoying what they read. This means moving from ‘learning to read‛ to ‘reading to learn‛. Being familiar with all the sounds that help build words is also fundamental in learning to spell. Again, once children have a solid understanding of how words are spelt, they can focus their thinking on word choices, sentence structure and the composition of their writing.
What does a phonics lesson at St Mary Magdalen’s look like?
Every phonics lesson is taught using this format:
- Review and Revisit: A recap previously taught sounds.
- Teach: Children learn a letter-sound correspondence in the context of a story
- Practise: The children practise reading and/or writing skills using a pupil practise booklet
- Apply: The children use fully-decodable books throughout the week to apply the phonics skills that they have been learning.
Below you will find the order that sounds and words are taught across Reception, Year 1 and Year 2:
We teach phonics using the validated systematic synthetic programme ‘Rocket Phonics.’ Rocket phonics is a story-based approach to the teaching of phonics. Phonics is taught daily in Early Years and Key Stage 1.
If you would like to know more about this scheme please follow the link below:
https://www.risingstars-uk.com/subjects/reading-and-ebooks/rising-stars-reading-planet/reading-planet-reception-and-ks1/rocket-phonics
How can you help at home?
In the first half term after you child starts in our Reception, we will run a phonics workshop where you can find out more and watch how a phonics lesson is taught. At this meeting, you will be given the resources that can be used to help support your child at home with phonics. Below are some resources (sound mats and tricky words mats for each phase) that you could use at home to help your child practise. Regular reading with your child will also support their early reading and writing development.
This video may be helpful to further explain the phonics scheme as well as giving examples of the letter sounds we teach: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nyGQY_GHtoQ
A parent guide to some of the terms we use:
- Blending: This skill is essential for reading. It’s when the individual sounds are run together so they make a word. E.g. J – a – m is blended to become jam.
- Digraph: Two letters that make one sound e.g. sh in fish
- Grapheme: A letter or group of letters that is used to write one sound. E.g. The sound igh can be written using the grapheme igh as in knight, i-e as in knife or ie as in tie
- Phoneme: This is a single sound, usually articulated with one mouth movement. Eg. C or ee
- Segmenting: This skill is essential for spelling. It’s when a word is broken down into its individual sounds. E.g. I can say the word pig and hear it is made up of the sounds p – i – g
- Split digraph: This is a type of grapheme. It is a group of two letters split up, used to make one sound. E.g. i-e as in like
- Trigraph: This is a type of grapheme. It is a group of three letters together, used to make one sound. e.g. igh as in bright