Reception
Phonics
Parent
Information
Session
January 2017
Meeting objectives
• To have an overview of how we teach
phonics at St George’s
• To look at cursive handwriting
• How you as parents/ families can
help your child at home
• To answer any of your questions
Phonics in Reception
•Children in the Foundation Stage are
taught phonics daily
•It begins with developing listening
skills, particularly discriminating
between sounds they can hear.
• The children are then taught to
listen to the sounds that different
letters make.
What can I do at
home?
•
Go on a ‘listening walk’ with your child
when you are outside – asking your
child to identify different sounds they
can hear e.g. a bird, a train, a car.
• Objects in a bag – what can they hear?
• Teaching
them
Nursery
singing songs that rhyme.
Rhymes
and
• Playing music and allowing your child
to move their body to the rhythm of the
music.
What can I do at
home?
Make sounds using a range of props,
such as running a stick along a fence
or tapping on a bin lid.
Alliteration is a lot of fun to play
around with. Your child’s name can be a
good place to start, for example, say:
‘Carl caught a cat’, ‘Jolly Jessie jumped’,
‘Mummy munches muffins’.
Oral blending
Hearing a series of spoken sounds and
• merging them together to make a
spoken word – no text is used
• For example, when a teacher calls
out b-u-s’, the children say ‘bus’
• This skill is usually taught before
blending and reading printed words
Oral Segmenting
The reverse of oral blending
• hearing a spoken word and
separating it into individual
sounds
• For example, when a teacher calls
out pig, the children say the
sounds ‘p-i-g’.
• Let’s have a try!
Pronouncing the sounds
You need to be careful when you are
saying the sounds with your
child.
Take great care not to ad an –uh to
the end of a sound as the
children might blend the word
incorrectly for example ‘t’ , j and p’
Learning what the letters look and
sound like.
•
This begins in Reception and the
children are introduced to letters in
sets (not in alphabetical order)
•
They begin to blend and segment
using these letters
s a t p i n
Can you think of some words we can
make using these letters?
•
•Lets go through the short, single sounds
together and the corresponding actions!
•Jolly Phonics
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BqhXUW_v1s&feature=player_embedded
What can I do at home?
•
Try breaking down simple words when
you are giving instructions or asking
questions, such as ‘Can you find your
h-a-t hat?’ ‘Sit on the s-ea-t seat’.
•
Find real objects around your home
that have three phonemes (sounds)
and practise ‘sound talk’. First, just
let them listen, then see if they will
join in, for example, saying:
‘I spy a p-e-g – peg.’
‘Simon says – put your hands on your
h-ea-d.’
What can I do at home?
Buy magnetic letters for your
fridge or foam letters for in the
bath. Find out which letters have
been taught so far – have fun
finding these with your child.
• Make words together, for example,
it, up, met, sat. As you select the
letters, say them aloud: ‘a-m – am’,
‘m-e-t – met’.
• Also do it the other way around:
read the word, break the word up
and move the letters away,
saying: ‘met – m-e-t’.
•
Blending
 We blend letters in words
in order to read:b-e-d
bed
Segmenting
 We segment words into graphemes
in order to write:-
ie:- man
-
m-a-n
But it’s not that simple!
Sometimes 2 letters make one sound
This is called a ‘digraph’.
For example in the word boat there
are 4 letters but 3 sounds b-oa-t
Try this now with the word farm.
How many times does your mouth
change shape?
Sound Buttons
• We often use the idea of sound buttons with the children. Give
your child a word and ask them to write the sound buttons
underneath. A small circle indicates a single sound and a large
oval represents a digraph. For example
octopus
rainbow
Phoneme Frame
•
We also use these phoneme frames as a
strategy to help children distinguish
between different sounds in a word. One
sound fits into a box for example
b
•
•
oa
t
Draw a phoneme frame if your child is
struggling to spell a word. Remember
the number of boxes matches the
number of sounds in a word and NOT
the number of letters.
Encourage your child to put in the
sounds they already know.
Important points to remember
• It is really important that children learn the names of the
letters as well as the sounds they represent. By the end of
Foundation Stage children are expected to know and be able to
use both sounds and letter names.
• When segmenting a word like shop sh-op it has 3 sounds but 4
letters. Children must refer to sh as the sound and not s-h
when blending and segmenting. Similarly the word boat b-oa-t
has 3 sounds but it has 4 letters.
Important points to remember
•
Sometimes the same letters are
pronounced differently for example
bread
chin
and sea
or
school
chef
The children will then use the context of what they are reading to
work out the correct sound
Important points to remember
•
Sometimes the same sound is spelt
differently
play, rain, lane,
great, straight,
eight, fete, they
Some words cannot be sounded out
These are called
‘common misconception words’
words.
Children learn them by sight.
 Flashcards
 Magnetic words
 Tricky word bingo
 Point them out in the
environment
Useful websites to help your child at home.
www.lettersandsounds.co.uk
interactive games and resources
BBC Words and Pictures
interactive games and resources
Mr Thorne does phonics
Clips available on You Tube
Phonicsplay.co.uk
interactive games
• Espresso has a fantastic
section on Phonics with
video clips for each
individual sound.
Handwriting
• At St Georges we use the cursive style of handwriting. We have
found that this style has had a huge impact on the quality of
handwriting across the school.
• We teach the children to write every letter with an entry and
exit stroke. This is a much better foundation for teaching joined
handwriting as they get older. Children are taught that
every letter starts on the line