Download Welcome to our parents` guide to phonics

Welcome to our parents' guide to phonics.
We start every day with a 20 minutes phonics session in each class
from Reception to Year 6. We make these sessions fun and interactive
using games and co-operative learning structures to ensure that the
children have a very firm grasp of spelling patterns and rules.
Handwriting practice is often incorporated.
We no longer send home weekly lists of spellings to be learned for a
test as we find that children could learn the words for a test but they did
not use them correctly in their writing! Instead our daily phonics practice
ensures that the patterns are firmly embedded.
Definitions
Children learn the correct terminology from an early age. This may not
be familiar to you!
Phoneme - a sound in a word. A phoneme may be represented/spelled in more than one way cat, kennel, choir. Phonemes are represented by graphemes.
Grapheme - a letter or sequence of letters that represent a phoneme. A grapheme may consist of
one (t) or two (kn) or more letters (igh), The same grapheme may represent more than one
phoneme - me, met.
Digraph - two letters represent one phoneme: both, train,: ch ur ch.
Segmenting - hearing the individual phonemes within a word eg the word crash consists of four
phonemes c-r-a-sh. In order to spell a word a child must segment it into its component
phonemes and choose a grapheme to represent each phoneme.
Blending - merging the individual phonemes together to pronounce a word. In order to read an
unfamiliar word, a child must recognise (sound out) each grapheme not each letter eg th-i-n not-th-i-n and then merge the phonemes together to make the word.
In one local school a teaching assistant had used the term Phoneme in the children's reading
diaries. She was inundated with phone calls from parents who thought she meant "phone me"!
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Learning Spellings
The best way to learn spellings is to use the "Look, Say, Cover, Write, Check" method of learning.
The children need to look at the word, say the word, cover up the word, write the word and then
check it. This is particularly useful for the words that are not easily remembered.
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Mnemonics
The use of mnemonics is a great way to help the children spell irregular high frequency (key
words).
For example we often use in school:
big elephants can always upset small elephants to teach the spelling of because and
seven ants in danger for said.
It helps if the children write the mnemonic and the word to be spelt and illustrates it with an
appropriate picture. Make them up with your child and make them fun!
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Investigating words within words
Looking for smaller words within words helps children to remember how to read and write words:
eg this - (his, is).
This mehtod is especially powerful when learning high frequency words that can be tricky to
remember:
eg they - (the, he).
Older children can look for words without the letters being consecutive:
eg chocolate - (eat, hot, catch, tale etc.)
Strategies for teaching high frequency words.
look - draw pupils inside and eyelashes above the oo never fails.
like (lik) discuss the tricky e bit in this word, write a patterned poem I like
they (thay) ask for other words in this word; practise writing the and they.
went teach to hear penultimate consonant by saying wet/went, bet/bent, set/sent and asking the
children to point to the word you are saying.
my (mi) children quickly pick up the y when it is pointed out, relate later to by, try.
(common mistakes in brackets).