What is Phonics?

Phonics is the primary approach that we use to teach reading and writing using the DfE accredited programme – Little Wandle Letters and Sounds Revised.

Phonics is taught as a separate 20–30 minute lesson each day in Foundation, Year 1 and Year 2.

Children in the Foundation Stage begin by playing with sounds, identifying the first sounds in words, learning rhyming words and orally blending and segmenting words.  After this, they progress to learning the first sets of letters and the sounds that they make.  There are approximately 44 sounds in the English language and these are written using approximately 140 graphemes (a single letter or group of letters).

The first set of letters and sounds learnt are s,a,t,p,i,n and as soon as these are taught, we begin to introduce the children to blending and segmenting short, simple words such as at, it, sat, pin, tin.

As the children move into Year 1, they begin to learn the more advanced code of phonics.  Over the year they will:

• Learn new graphemes for reading e.g. ay makes the same sound as ai
• Learn alternative pronunciations for graphemes e.g. i is pronounced differently in fin and find
• Learn alternative spellings e.g. the phoneme j can be spelt g (as in giant) or dge (as in bridge)
• Learn to choose the appropriate graphemes when spelling and begin to build up word specific knowledge

Useful Terms

Blending is merging sounds to make words e.g. c-a-t cat.  This is the skill needed for reading words.

Segmenting is breaking a word up into the individual sounds and then identifying which letters to use for each sound e.g. cat c-a-t.  This is the skill needed for writing words.

Phoneme – the smallest speech sound in a word, for example

• in has 2 phonemes/speech sounds i-n
• bat has 3 phonemes b-a-t
• chip has 3 phonemes ch-i-p
• night has 3 phonemes n-igh-t
• cartoon has 5 phonemes c-ar-t-oo-n
• starlight has 6 phonemes s-t-ar-l-igh-t 

Grapheme – a written representation of a phoneme e.g. which letter or letters to use when writing a sound

Digraph – two letters that make one sound e.g. ch ck th ng

Trigraph – three letters that make one sound e.g. air ear igh

Split digraph - a ‘split digraph’ is simply two letters, split apart, which make one sound such as a-e, e-e, i-e, o-e and u-e.  For example, there are split vowel digraphs in these words: cake, Pete, shine, home and cube.  You might remember learning this as ‘magic e’.  That term is no longer used as it may be confusing.  The children learn the digraphs as a whole and that they are split apart by a letter or letters in between.

Useful Phonics Websites

• Interactive games linked to each phase and a useful section on information for parents: http://www.phonicsplay.co.uk/
• Games and resources linked to each phase of Letters and Sounds: http://www.letters-and-sounds.com/
• BBC CBeebies series of animated programmes featuring the Alphablocks characters – great for practising sounds and blending words: http://www.bbc.co.uk/cbeebies/shows/alphablocks
• A website set up by a Year 1 teacher who started making phonics videos for his class.  He has since become very popular and has now created his own phonics apps: http://mrthorne.com/
• A collection of further games and resources can be found in the Letters and Sounds section of this website: http://www.topmarks.co.uk/Interactive.aspx?cat=40