Why Follow Phonics ?

A Primary school teacher with a passion for phonics.
If you are a parent and you want to have a better understanding of how phonics is taught in schools and you wish to implement similar methods at home then follow our learning journey.
Children and families have recently faced uncertain times and some are worried that children may fall behind in their learning.
I want to provide a platform of learning videos across our website with tips and tricks on how to approach phonics at home. We have our own bank of learning resources made available that we believe will encourage children’s love for reading.

What is phonics?

In simple terms… Phonics is a method of learning to read whereby words are broken down into individual sounds and then blended back together. Children are taught to “decode” words by recognising different groups of sounds (phonic phases).

Phonics terminology

Phoneme	- a sound as it is said.
	eg:  k, which occurs in words such as cat, kite, scalp, skill,

Grapheme	- a sound in written form
	The name grapheme is given to the letter or combination of letters that represents a phoneme. eg, the word 'sheep' contains five letters and three graphemes ('sh,' 'ee,' and 'p'), representing three phonemes

.
Digraph- two letters that work together to make the same sound.
Trigraph - Three letters that work together to make the same sound.
Split digraph - Two letters that work together to make the same sound, separated by another letter (eg) (o-e sound bone, phone, stone)

High Frequency Words:

Words that appear most frequently in written material such as “and”
“the” “it” . They are sometimes referred to as (sight words) these would be the words that can be sounded out quickly by sight.
Alien words/Nonsense words/Pseudo words: These are a collection of letters that follow phonic rules that your child would have learnt in school. However they have no meaning and are unfamiliar words. They are a significant part of the Year 1 Phonics Screening Check to establish children’s phonetic ability and are assessed on this.
Robot Arms: A term that might be used to encourage children to use arm movement to segment and blend different sounds.
Sound buttons: Visual spots that can be seen under words to support reading.
S a t Sheep