Information for Parents and Carers

Transcription

1 Helping to support your child at home We will be provide you with weekly information about which phase your child is on and the phonemes, graphemes, key words, tricky words and spelling rules they have been practising in school. Please help support your child by reinforcing the learning of phonics with them at home. We will be providing lots of fun ideas for games, activities and websites you can visit to help support them. Below is a list of websites that can support you and your child with their phonics Lots of free games for each phase, especially good for reading non-words. You can also subscribe to access more games. Includes further information on each phase as well as printable resources and links to online games. Some games looking at sounds and high frequency words. Some printable activities too. Wide range of games for sounds, words and rhyming. Wide range of games for sounds, words and rhyming. Games to practise key skills such as rhyming, punctuation and grammar. Selection of videos to help support each phase Please also visit our school VLE as we regularly update our phonics page with information, new ideas, games and activities for you. Further questions If you have any questions about phonics and how to support your child at home, please do not hesitate to speak to your child s class teacher. Bolshaw Primary School Information for Parents and Carers Working together to help support your child at home.

2 This guide is to help you understand how we teach phonics at Bolshaw Primary School and the part that you can play in helping your child become a confident and fluent reader. Our aim is for all our children to become independent, life long readers, able to read a wide range of texts for a variety of purposes with understanding and for pleasure. We welcome and encourage support from home in the teaching of phonics and reading. We hope that the information in this booklet will be of help in this partnership between home and school. What is phonics? Phonics is about learning letter sounds NOT the letter names. Phonics is the relationship between letters and sounds. Words are made up from small units of sound called phonemes. Phonics teaches children to be able to listen carefully and identify the phonemes that make up each word. This helps children to learn to read words and to spell words. How do we teach phonics at Bolshaw? In school, we follow the DFE Letters and Sounds programme and we learn the Jolly Phonics actions alongside each phoneme. Children in Reception, Year 1 and Year 2 take part in high-quality phonics sessions every day. These are fun sessions involving lots of speaking, listening and games, where the emphasis is on children s active participation. They learn to use their phonic knowledge for reading and writing activities and in their independent learning during the day. Here are examples of common suffixes suitable for Phase Six. s, es ed, ing ful er est ly ment ness y -s and -es: added to nouns and verbs, as in cats, runs, bushes, catches; -ed and -ing: added to verbs, as in hopped, hopping, hoped, hoping; -ful: added to nouns, as in careful, painful, playful, restful, mouthful; -er: added to verbs to denote the person doing the action and to adjectives to give the comparative form, as in runner, reader, writer, bigger, slower; -est: added to adjectives, as in biggest, slowest, happiest, latest; -ly: added to adjectives to form adverbs, as in sadly, happily, brightly, lately; -ment: added to verbs to form nouns, as in payment, advertisement, development; -ness: added to adjectives to form nouns, as in darkness, happiness, sadness; -y: added to nouns to form adjectives, as in funny, smoky, sandy. The spelling of a suffix is always the same, except in the case of -s and - es. Generally, -s is simply added to the base word. The suffix -es is used after words ending in s(s), ch, sh and z(z), and when y is replaced by i; buses, passes, benches, catches, rushes, buzzes, babies. Words such as knife, leaf and loaf become knives, leaves and loaves and again the change in spelling is obvious from the change in the pronunciation of the word. What is the Year 1 Phonics Screening Check? The Year 1 phonics screening check is a compulsory short assessment to confirm whether individual pupils have learnt phonic decoding to an appropriate standard. It is administered during the summer term in Year 1 by their teacher. The check will involve your child reading 40 words- 20 real words and 20 pseudo words. Expectations are that children need to be secure in Phase 5 at the end of Year 1 to be able to pass the screening check. If your child is struggling with their phonics and reading, their class teacher will contact you discuss how we will provide further support for them and how you can help support them at home. Below is an example of some of the words your child will be asked to read during the screening check. beg osk ect sum plod some children fronk fowspin said

3 Phase 6 By the beginning of Phase Six, children should know most of the common graphemes. They should be able to read hundreds of words, doing this in three ways: reading the words automatically if they are very familiar; decoding them quickly and silently because their sounding and blending routine is now well established; decoding them aloud. Children s spelling should be phonetically accurate, although it may still be a little unconventional at times. Spelling usually lags behind reading, as it is harder. During this phase, children become fluent readers and increasingly accurate spellers. The teaching of past tense is introduced in this phase; First orally; go went, come came, say said. Using the words yesterday and today in discussions to reinforce the different meanings; for example Today I will come to school. Yesterday I came to school. Then through the addition of a suffix (letters added to the end of a word) in spelling ed. rounded, helped, turned, begged, hissed, wanted, sorted, hummed, waded, washed, hated, greased, lived, robbed, rocked, laughed, called, roasted. Common spelling rules are also established; The position of a phoneme in a word may rule out certain graphemes for that phoneme. The ai and oi spellings do not occur at the end of English words or immediately before suffixes; instead, the ay and oy spellings are used in these positions (e.g. play, played, playing, playful, joy, joyful, enjoying, enjoyment). What does a phonics lesson look like? Children are taught phonics in a daily 20 minute session. The session includes 5 minutes spent on reviewing sounds that have previously been taught, 10 minutes teaching a new sound and practising reading and writing the sound in words. The session then concludes with 5 minutes being spent on applying what they have learnt in a reading or writing context. Why teach phonics? From a very early stage, children develop awareness of different sounds in spoken language. They develop understanding that spoken words are made up of different sounds (phonemes) and they learn to match these phonemes to letters (graphemes). Phonics is about children knowing how letters link to sounds (graphemes to phonemes), for example, c as in cat, ll as in fell, ee as in sheep. Children use this phonic knowledge when they are reading and writing. This approach has been shown to provide a quick and efficient way for most young children to learn to read words on the page, fluently and accurately. We want children to develop this skill so that it becomes automatic. This also greatly helps them with their spelling. How is our phonics teaching delivered? Letters and Sounds is divided into six phases, with each phase building on the skills and knowledge of previous learning. There are no big leaps in learning. Children have time to practise and rapidly expand their ability to read and spell words. They are also taught to read and spell tricky words, which are words with spellings that are unusual or that children have not yet been taught.

4 What terminology will my child be using? What is a phoneme? A phoneme is the smallest unit of sound. There are 44 phonemes (speech sounds) For example: cat is made up of 3 phonemes c a t cart is made up of 3 phonemes c ar t We will teach your child to count the number of phonemes, by saying the word in robot talk, then counting the phonemes (sounds) on his or her fingers at first. Your child will also learn to distinguish the difference between a long, stretchy phoneme (such as s, l, m and n) and short, bouncy phonemes (such as a, b, d, and g) What is a grapheme? A grapheme is the letters we use to represent the phoneme (sound) There are 140+ graphemes For example: The word sail has 3 phonemes s ai - l. The grapheme for the a phoneme in the word sail is ai. The word pay has 2 phonemes p ay. What is a digraph? A digraph is 2 letters which make one phoneme. For example: The word push has 3 phonemes p u - sh. The word fell has 3 phonemes f e -ll. The ll in the word fell, and the sh in push are digraphs because they are written with 2 letters. Your child will be taught double consonants, such as ll and ss, are friendly letters. What is a trigraph? A trigraph is 3 letters which make a phoneme For example : light has 3 phonemes l igh-t. The i phoneme in light is written as igh. igh is a trigraph because it has 3 letters to make the phoneme Phase 5 During Phase 5 children broaden their knowledge of graphemes and phonemes for use in reading and spelling. They will learn new graphemes and alternative pronunciations for some that they have already learnt. In Phase 5, 19 new graphemes for reading are taught: ay ou ie ea oy ir au ue aw wh ph ew oe ey a_e e_e i_e o_e u_e One new phoneme is taught: zh And 25 more tricky words are added too: Oh their people Mr Mrs looked called asked water where who again thought through work mouse many laughed once friends eyes any different because please Found in words like treasure, measure, vision. The children should now be able to spell the Phase 4 tricky words. Children will also learn split digraphs. This is when the 2 letters in a diagraph such as ie have been split up by the final sound in the word. For example in the word time, the m has split up the ie digraph so it is known as a split digraph, i_e.

5 Phase 4 The purpose of this phase is to consolidate children s knowledge of graphemes in reading and spelling words containing adjacent consonants and words with more than one syllable. Children will learn to read 14 more tricky words: some come one said do so were when have there out like little what And spell the 12 tricky words from Phase 3: he she we me be was my you her they all are You could also practise these words in captions or sentences to help your child learn them. Making up little rhymes to remember them can help too! Eg: said= silly ants in dustbins. were=worms eat red eggs. Children will also learn to read and spell CVCC (consonant, vowel, consonant, consonant) words such as tent, paint, shelf using phoneme frames; What is segmenting? Segmenting is the process that your child learn, to break words down to spell. Segmenting is when you take a spoken word, e.g. him, and identify the individual sounds h-i-m then working out how to write each sound to create the word. Your child knows segmenting as pulling a word apart Your child will learn to segment cap into c a p. Your child will learn to segment dog into d o g. What is blending? Blending is the process that your child will learn to use, to build words to read. Blending is the process that is involved in merging the phonemes (sounds) together to make a word, e.g. c-a-t into the word cat. Your child knows blending as putting the sounds together Your child will blend the phonemes c a t together to read the word cat. Your child will blend the phonemes n i p together to read the word nip. What is a consonant blend? Previously, consonant blends were taught as if there was something special about them. Children were taught that /st/ was one phoneme, when actually it is two, /s/ and /t/. Think about it. Why teach /st/ when children already know /s/ and /t/? It just wastes time and clogs up children s memory. But note that sh is a digraph. It cannot be made by a process of blending the two letter sounds of /s/ and /h/ together. What are pseudo words? Pseudo words are non-words. The children refer to these words as nonsense words. They need to know the difference between real words and words that are not real. We also call nonsense words, trash words and real words, treasure words. What are tricky words? Tricky words are words that are known as sight words because you cannot decode them. These start from Phase 2.

6 What is my child expected to know in the different phases? Phase 1 In this phase children should experience sounds and become aware of them in their everyday environment. Children should enjoy experimenting with the sounds different objects can make for example leaves crunching. Experiment how sound changes if the objects are bigger or smaller. Children need the opportunity to develop their language. This can be supported by encouraging children to use language for thinking by asking questions such as What does it feel like to be in the tunnel, under the table, in the middle of a field? Going on listening walks - what can they hear? They need to experience activities that simulate writing; large movements, such as swirling ribbons in the air or using paint brushes to paint or in water. Children also need to listen to a range of nursery rhymes and stories. They need to hear them over and over again so that they can repeat them. This will help a lot later on! Things to help support your child at home; Playing with sounds; Help children to make sounds that match animals or objects e.g. A bee goes buz-z-z-z and a cow goes m-o-o-o-o. Letter association; Have an item such as a ball. Establish the first sound b (said buh ). Can they find another item that starts with b? Can they put all the items that start with b together? I Spy - give children a small selection of items (4 or 5) to choose from so that the game remains focused. Rhymes and rhyming; Think of a word or an object such as cat. What other words can you think of that rhyme? sat, mat, bat etc. Changing rhymes that they know, such as Hickory, Dickory Dable, the mouse ran up the...? Phase 2 By the end of phase 2, the children should know 23 sounds (phonemes): And be able to read 5 tricky words: s a t p i n m d g o c k ck e u r h b f ff l ll ss the to I no go Children should start to sound out and blend cvc (consonant, vowel, consonant) words e.g. when you sound out c-a-t, they can tell you the word is cat. Phase 3 Phase 3 builds on Phase 2 and the children learn 25 more sounds, diagraphs and trigraph (two or more letters together that make a single sound): j v w x y z, zz qu ch sh th ng ai ee igh oa oo ar or ur ow oi ear air ure er And 12 more tricky words to read: he she we me be was my you her they all are They should now, also, be able to spell the 5 tricky words from phase 2.