USEFUL WEBSITES:
Below are two useful websites which can either help with further
understanding of phonics or for interactive games if your child has
access to a computer at home.
Letters and sounds:
http://www.letters-and-sounds.com/
This outlines the phases we are working through and what your
child is learning at each phase. It also has some resources such as
word cards that can be printed and some great interactive games,
some that your child is likely to be familiar with.
Phonics Play:
http://www.phonicsplay.co.uk/
This website has some fantastic games on, again in each of the
phases. Games such as buried treasure and picnic of pluto (bob
and obb) feature where children can practice segmenting and
blending.
GENERAL ASSISTANCE:
If you have any further queries or would like a reminder of how to
enunciate the phonemes you can always come and see me or ask
your child’s class teacher.
Thank you
Miss Nicola Rose.
Helping your child
with….
INTRODUCTION TO PHONICS:
Phonics is now the recommended first strategy for teaching
children to read. In it’s simplest form, it is teaching children
sounds to enable them to break words down into segments known as
phonemes. Therefore, in primary schools we teach children each of
the sounds and also how to segment words and blend.
DEFINITION OF PHONIC TERMS:
We have 26 letters in the alphabet, but 44 phonemes (sounds) and
around 120 graphemes
PHONEME: A phoneme is the sound a letter or combination of
letters makes for example ‘ai’ just makes one sound.
GRAPHEME: This is the way of writing the phoneme down. So
there may be more than one way of writing down a sound – for
example ‘er – hammer, ur – fur, ir – bird. The sound is the same but
it looks different when written.
DIGRAPH – Where two letters make one sound – for example ‘ai –
rain’, ‘er – summer’, ‘ee – week’, ‘oo – good’.
TRIGRAPH – Where three letters make one sound – for example ‘igh
– night’; ‘ear – hear’.
SEGMENTING– Breaking down a word into its phonemes (sounds) –
e.g. the word ‘night’,if you break it down into it’s phonemes and
sound the word out, it would be n-igh-t.
BLENDING – Putting the sounds back together to say the word.
PHONETICALLY DECODABLE – Words that can be broken down
into phonemes.
TRICKY WORDS – Words which can not be ‘sounded out’ and
children have to learn these words on sight, such as ‘the, to, he, she,
was, you’.
JOLLY PHONICS:
At Tiptree Heath we use jolly phonics to teach letters and sounds. Every phoneme
has a song and an action to go with it, and this makes the sound memorable for
children with various learning styles, and helps all pupils to engage with their
learning. The sounds and actions are as follows:
Jolly Phonics Actions
Group 1
s
Weave hand in an s shape, like a snake, and say ssssss.
a
Wiggle fingers above elbow as if ants crawling on you and say a, a, a.
t
Turn head from side to side as if watching tennis and say t, t, t.
i
Pretend to be a mouse by wriggling fingers at end of noise and squeak i, i, i.
p
Pretend to puff out candles and say p, p, p.
n
Make a noise, as if you are a plane – hold arms out and say nnnnnn.
Group 2
ck
Raise hands and snap fingers as if playing castanets and say ck, ck, ck.
e
Pretend to tap an egg on the side of a pan and crack it into the pan, saying
eh, eh, eh.
h
Hold hand in front of mouth panting as if you are shaking out of breath and
say h, h, h
r
Pretend to be a puppy holding a piece of rag, shaking head from side to
side, and say rrrrrr.
m
Rub tummy as if seeing tasty food and say mmmmmm.
d
Beat hands up and down as if playing a drum and say d, d, d.
Group 3
g
Spiral hand down, as if water going down the drain, and say g, g, g.
o
Pretend to turn light switch on and off and say o, o, o, o.
u
Pretend to be putting up an umbrella and say u, u, u.
l
Pretend to lick a lollipop and say l, l, l, l, l, l.
f
Let hands gently come together as if toy fish deflating, and say f, f, f, f,
f, f.
b
Pretend to hit a ball with a bat and say b, b, b.
Group 4
ai
Cup hand over ear and say ai, ai, ai
j
Pretend to wobble on a plate and say j, j, j.
oa
Bring hand over mouth as if you have done something wrong and say oh!
ie
Stand to attention and salute, saying ie ie.
ee or Put hands on head as if ears on a donkey and say eeyore, eeyore.
Group 5
z
Put arms out at sides and pretend to be a bee, saying zzzzzz.
w
Blow on to open hand, as if you are the wind, and say wh, wh, wh.
ng
Imagine you are a weightlifter, and pretend to lift a heavy weight above
your head, saying ng…
v
Pretend to be holding the steering wheel of a van and say vvvvvv.
oo OO Move head back and forth as if it is the cuckoo in a cuckoo clock, saying u,
oo; u, oo (Little and long oo)
Group 6 and 7 come later this year and so the necessary guidance will be given
out nearer the time.
APPLYING DIGRAPHS AND TRIGRAPHS:
Children can be quick at picking up the digraphs in isolation,
however, when the digraph is then in the middle of the word, a
child can struggle to apply that knowledge. To help with this when
reading you can draw an invisible line under the digraph to make
them aware it’s a digraph or warn them as they are building up to
reading that digraph.
You can also say words and then sound it out and ask what digraph
they can hear and then encourage the child to write the word
after having drawn attention to the digraph.
WRITING WORDS:
As above if you are helping your child to write words, sometimes
it’s helpful to say a word, sound it out slowly and then say it again
to help them hear each of the sounds (phonemes). You can also use
a ‘phoneme frame’ (below) which helps us break a word into both
the single sounds and digraphs.
For example the word night, in a phoneme frame you would write:
n
igh
PHASES WITHIN PHONICS:
We follow the government document’ Letters and sounds’ which
follows 6 phases which take the children from Nursery to Year
2 – however the use of phonics will continue higher up the
school.
Phase 1 –
Begins in
Nursery and
continues in
Reception.
Seven aspects, including environmental
sounds, instrumental sounds, body sounds,
rhythm and rhyme, alliteration, voice
sounds and finally oral blending and
segmenting.
Phase 2 –
Reception
Learning 19 sounds
(s,a,t,p,g,o,c,k,i,n,m,d,e,u,r,h,b,f,l) and the
digraphs ck, ss, ff, ll. Children taught to
segment to separate words and blend.
Children will learn to read simple
sentences,
Phase 3 –
Reception
Learning j, v, w, x, y, z, qu. 18 other
graphemes are taught which are digraphs
or trigraphs (zz, ch, sh, th, ng, ai, ee, igh,
oa, oo, ar, or,ur, ow, oi, ear, air, ure, er.
Reading and writing simple captions and
sentences.
Phase 4 –
Reception/
Year 1
No new sounds are taught. Learning to
segment and blend longer words.
Phase 5 –
Year 1
Children learn more graphemes for the
phonemes they already know, as well as
different ways of pronouncing the
graphemes they already know.
Phase 6 –
Year 2 and
beyond.
Working on spelling, including prefixes and
sufixes, doubling and dropping letters.
t
Boat:
b
oa
t
n
a
p
sh
ee
p
Nap:
Sheep:
HOW TO HELP YOUR CHILD AT HOME
Children need to regularly recap all of the sounds and apply their
growing sound knowledge to reading and writing activities. The
following are some suggested activities to do at home:
Sound recall and recognition:
Having individual letter cards and going through each sound and
ensuring that you child is saying the sound and not just the jolly
phonics song. The songs can be used to help as a prompt – e.g.
what sound does inky the mouse make? To make it more
interesting, you could get the children to teach you the sounds or
have a competition and for every sound they get right they can
keep the letter and for every sound they are not sure of you can
keep the letter and then recap again.
Segmenting/blending:
You can either write words or have word cards of 3 and 4 letter
words – such as cat, sat, mat, luck, pin, tin, cup, dog, duck, sit, pit,
pot, dot, got, lots. See if your child can break the words down into
sounds – such sat – s – a – t and then ask them to ‘blend’ the sounds
back together which means once you have slowly sounded it out –
you could say the sounds a bit faster until your child can say the
whole word. It is quite often a good idea to point to each sound
when they are ‘segmenting’ and then slide your finger in a line when
blending. Little red dots underneath a sound (sound buttons) also
work well.
You could also use the individual sound cards and say a word and
ask your child to form the word by moving letters. For example
giving them 7or 8 letters and asking them to spell various words.
m
Examples
of words
s
p
oa
s
oa
p
a
a
p
t
t
ee
Buried treasure/Bob and obb:
To begin with, you need a number of words that are both ‘real’
words and ‘made up’ words which can be broken down into the
sounds so not tricky words. Later in this booklet are some websites
which may help you with this. A few suggestions of words are week; book; pat; lal; leel (not real words). Your child needs to sound
out the word and then either put it into a treasure chest if it is a
word or a bin if it is not a word. If you are playing with bob, you
can feed it to bob if it is a word and obb if it is not.
Not only does this really help your children with their segmenting
and blending but it also helps children to expand their
understanding of a word or a non-word. This features heavily on
the year one phonics screening in June.
gilp
good
Tricky words:
In Reception and Year one you should have envelopes of high
frequency words and tricky words which are sent home with your
child. Tricky words are the words that you can not use the sounds
for example ‘the, to, no, go, I, into, be, she, we, me, was, you, all,
they, are, my, her’. You can also help your child with learning to
write these words – by showing them the word thinking of ways to
remember it and then covering it and writing it from memory.
Using letter names:
Sing the alphabet song or when doing the sound recall asking for
the letter name and playing similar games. Explain the difference
of letter names and sounds as children need to know both.