Phonics
Phonics (also known as ‘synthetic phonics’) is the teaching of reading by developing awareness of the sounds in words and the corresponding letters used to represent those sounds.
The Early Reading Framework (ERF) is a new, non-statutory guidance document released by the Department for Education (DfE) which examines best practice in early reading, and how you can give children the best start in reading.
It looks at core areas of reading: phonics, comprehension and reading for pleasure, and the importance of all three of these core areas in ensuring children are confident, fluent and competent readers.
Systematic synthetic phonics should be the sole strategy for teaching children to decode and read words. Schools choose a suitable systematic synthetic phonics programme to ensure books are at the right level for children, ensuring texts are a perfect match to children’s developing phonics knowledge to ensure that children can practise and feel confident in the grapheme-phoneme correspondences they have learned.
Please find below the presentation and handouts from our latest Parents workshop.
/docs/PHONICS/Parents_Phonics_Workshop_17th_Jan_2024.zip
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At St.Mary’s we use the Pearson Phonics Bug scheme of learning and corresponding phonetically decodable books.
General Introduction to Phonics bug
There are also resources and books that you can access from home. Your child has their own login and username.
Click here for a parents welcome letter
Click here for a user guide.
If you have lost your username/password then please contact the class teacher.
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There are 6 main phases of phonics teaching and learning:
Pure sounds are the correct way that letters and sounds should be pronounced when teaching and learning phonics. Please see this link to check that you are pronouncing letters/sounds the same at home, as we are in school. Consistency really helps the children when they are an early reader.
Reception
Reception / Year 1
Year 1
Year 2
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When we teach the children phonics, we share and use the correct terminology with them. It is very common for adults to not know the meaning of some of the terms that we use. Here is a quick jargon buster, that will help! We ask that you use the same terminology with your children, when reading and working with them at home.
Click here for a phonics glossary
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It is really important that the children recognise and can play with these graphemes in different ways:
1 – Sight recognition in isolation e.g. oa = the sound oa as in boat.
2 – Recognition when segmenting. Segmenting is the process of separating a word into its individual letters and sounds e.g. sp-oo-n. Vital for spelling.
3 – Recognition when blending. Blending is the process of pushing the letters and sounds in words together, to read or hear the word e.g. h-au-n-t ---------haunt. Vital for reading.
4 – Choosing the correct grapheme to spell a word, when there is more than one possibility (known as alternative sounds) e.g. ay/ai/a-e/a. They all make the same sound!
5 – Knowing that some graphemes can make different sounds e.g. the grapheme ‘ea’ in b-r-ea-d actually makes a short ‘e’ vowel sound, whereas in g-l-ea-m, it makes a long ‘e’ vowel sound.
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Tricky Words:
These are words that the children should be able to read (and ideally spell) by the end of each phase. They are called tricky words as they can not all be sounded out.
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