Phonics
“The books transported her into new worlds and introduced her to amazing people who lived exciting lives. She went on olden-day sailing ships with Joseph Conrad. She went to Africa with Ernest Hemingway and to India with Rudyard Kipling. She travelled all over the world while sitting in her little room in an English village.”
― Roald Dahl, Matilda
Watch how our programme works HERE
Our helpful phrases and sayings HERE
We use the Supersonic Phonics Friends programme.
This is a programme that takes children through their phonics learning from making and hearing sounds in the early years, through learning 44+ phonemes during Reception and Year 1, leading to learning more complex spelling strategies in Year 2.
Children will learn to recognise each letter and match it to its sound, moving onto groups of two (digraphs such as sh in the word shop) or three (trigraphs such as igh in the word night)of letters that say new sounds when together. They learn how to pronounce these sounds (phonemes) correctly so that they can blend (sound out) words successfully.
Actions
It is important to help children learn their graphemes and how to say them through helpful actions. Please see attached action cards below.
Click here for a phonics 'sound wall' to check how sounds should be pronounced
Please find below:
- Characters and what they do
- Tricky Words to sight read and spell
- Sound cards and their actions
Learning to read is a vital part of your child's learning journey, learning to love and enjoy reading is just, if not more important. The experience of reading is not just decoding the words on the page but understanding what they mean, questioning the narratives in front of them and seeing how stories can be performed, orally spoken, put to music and used to inspire the highest form of research - PLAY!
Sound Buttons
We put 'sound buttons' under each letter (a filled in circle) to help us sound out each phoneme. We press them a little more quickly each time to see if we can hear a real word!
Phonics Order
This is the order in which we learn phonemes and the stage at which we are initially exposed to them.
(Pre-School/Reception)
Phase 1 concentrates on developing children's speaking and listening skills and lays the foundations for the phonic work which starts in Phase 2. The emphasis during Phase 1 is to get children attuned to the sounds around them and ready to begin developing oral blending and segmenting skills.
Basics 2 (Reception)
Set 1: s, a, t, p
Set 2: i, n, m, d
Set 3: g, o, c, k
Set 4: ck, e, u, r
Set 5: h, b, f, ff, l, ll, ss
Super Power Words: I, go, to,no, the, into
Basics 3 (Reception)
Set 6: j, v, w, x
Set 7: y, z, zz, qu Consonant digraphs: ch, sh, th, ng
Vowel digraphs: ai, ee, oa, oo, ar, or, ow, oi, igh, ear, air, er
Super Power Words: he, she,we,me,be,was,you, have, they,all,are,my,her
Basics 4 (Reception)
In Phase 4, no new graphemes are introduced. The main aim of this phase is to consolidate the children's knowledge and to help them learn to read and spell words which have adjacent consonants, such as trap, string and milk.
Super Power Words: said have like so do some come were there little one when out what
Please note: Phonics supports children learning sounds at their own pace, and children will be supported according to their individual journey through activities provided during and after our phonics sessions. It is also worth noting that in phonics, securing blending of words eg. sh-e-ll is shell and correct pronunciation of sounds eg. 'mmm' as opposed to saying 'mer' or 'em' is key, alongside learning how to read and write the phonemes above.
Phonics Online Games
A website full of games we play in class!
Read with Fonics games
Fun Phonics games
Sing along to our jolly phonics songs
Phonics Dicitionary
Phoneme - The smallest unit of sound eg. c or a There are approximately 44 phonemes in English (it depends on different accents). Phonemes can be put together to make words.
Grapheme - A way of writing down a phoneme. Graphemes can be made up from 1 letter e.g. p, 2 letters e.g. sh, 3 letters e.g. tch or 4 letters e.g ough.
Digraph - A grapheme containing two letters that makes just one sound (phoneme) eg. sh
Trigraph - A grapheme containing three letters that makes just one sound (phoneme) eg. igh.
Blending- This involves looking at a written word, looking at each grapheme and working out which phoneme each grapheme represents and then merging these phonemes together to make a word. This is the basis of reading eg. d-o-g is dog!
Segmenting - This involves hearing a word, splitting it up into the phonemes that make it, using knowledge of GPCs to work out which graphemes represent those phonemes and then writing those graphemes down in the right order. This is the basis of spelling. eg. dog is d-o-g
Sound Buttons - we sometimes put little dots/beans under each phoneme/letter to help us sound out each phoneme when reading.
Tricky Words/Super Power Words/Sight Words - words which cannot be sounded out correctly using the Jolly Phonics sounds. The only way these words can be read and spelled correctly is by learning them and having plenty of practice eg. the, to, go
Phonics Progression of Skills and Knowledge