Phonics Parents Meeting
Monday 25th January at 2p.m.
Who we are….
Mrs Jankowska
Miss Ranson
Miss Andrews
Nursery Teacher
Reception Teacher
Year 1Teacher
What is phonics?
• A method of teaching children to read by matching sounds with letters.
• Phonics is recommended as the first strategy that children should be taught in
helping them learn to read.
• It runs alongside other teaching methods such as guided reading and shared
reading to help children develop all the vital reading skills and hopefully give them
a real love of reading.
Vocabulary your child might use
• Segmenting and blending or chopping up
• Phoneme
• Grapheme
• Digraph
• Trigraph
• Split digraph
• Sound buttons
How do we teach Phonics
at St Francis?
• Letters and Sounds
• Divided into 6 phases, each phases builds on the skills and knowledge of previous
learning.
• Lesson format:
• Revise
• Teach
• Practise
• Apply
How do we teach Phonics
at St Francis?
• Jolly phonics
• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Djz82FBYiug&index=1&list=RDDjz82FBYiug
• Letters and sounds
• http://www.letters-and-sounds.com/
• Abacus website
• https://www.activelearnprimary.co.uk/login?c=0
• Phonics Play website
• http://www.phonicsplay.co.uk/
What does Phonics consist 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.
Phoneme
• A phoneme is the smallest unit of sound in a word.
• For example:
• Cat – has three phonemes
• Frog – has four phonemes
How many does the word crab have?
Grapheme
• A grapheme means the letters that represent the phoneme.
• Children need to practise recognising the grapheme and saying the phoneme it
represents
• A grapheme can be 1 letter, 2 letters or more!
Phoneme - Grapheme
Phoneme is what you hear
Grapheme is what you see
A word always has the same number of graphemes and
phonemes!
The 44 phonemes
Here is where it gets tricky…
• Phonemes represent graphemes
• Graphemes can consist of 1,2 or more letters
• A phoneme can be represented (spelt) in more than one way:
• cat, king, choir
• The same grapheme may represent more than one phoneme
• she, shed
Segmenting and blending
• This is the way we teach the children to sound out their words to enable them to
read them.
• For example:
• Segmenting the word cat would be c – a – t
• Then blend them back together to say cat
• Children often use their hands to separate the sounds and clap to blend them back
together, if you could also encourage this at home.
Digraph
• Once the children recognise the single phonemes we start with digraphs
• Digraphs are 2 letters that make 1 sound
• ng
• ss
• ch
• ai
• oa
• Just to name a couple, there are many more..
Trigraph
• Next we look at trigraphs
• A trigraph means 3 letters that make 1 sound
• igh
• dge
• ear
• air
• Just to name a couple, there are more..
Segmenting Activity 
• Can you say how many phonemes are each of these words:
• Shelf
• Dress
• Light
• String
• Chair
The answers…
• Shelf – 4 phonemes – sh – e – l – f
• Dress – 4 phonemes – d – r – e – ss
• Light – 3 phoemes – l – igh – t
• String - 5 phonemes – s – t – r – i – ng
• Chair – 2 phonemes – ch - air
Tricky words
• With every rule there are always exceptions these are tricky words. Words that are not
phonically decodable:
• Was
• I
• The
• Do
• Said
• Have
• Just to name a couple, there are many more..
Sound buttons
• These are the lines and dots we teach the children to write underneath the
words to help them to identify the different sounds in their words.
tail
sail
Split Digraph
• A split digraph is vowel sound that a been split. A magic ‘e’.
cake
home
Phonics Screening Test in Year 1
• Week commencing the 13th June
• Children are given 40 words to read
• 20 real words
• 20 alien words
• The pass mark in previous years has been 32.
• If the children fail the test in Year 1 they will retake it in Year 2
How you can help at home
• Play “I spy”
• Use websites for phonic games
• Encourage segmenting and blending
• Look at tricky words with your child