An Introduction to Phonics

Definitions:

Phonics- the teaching of reading- linking between letters (graphemes) and sounds (phonemes).

Phoneme- the sound you hear, e.g the letter a makes the /a/ sound

Grapheme- what you see- the letter or letter combinations

Digraph- 2 letters for one sound e.g.ch

Trigraph- 3 letters for one sound e.g. igh

Split vowel digraph - two vowels split by a consonant, making one sound, e.g. a-e in make

Blend- merging the sounds together to read- e.g. /c/-/a/-/t/t = cat

Segment – hearing a word and splitting the sounds to write e.g. cat= /c/-/a/-/t/

Tricky words- words that can’t be taught using phonics and have to be learnt through memory

Sound buttons- the ‘buttons’ or images we draw below sounds when teaching in a visual way

e.g.

A dot is shown underneath one-letter, a line for 2+letter sounds. For split-vowel a curve underneath, missing out the consonant and joining the vowels, is drawn.

This Pack:

This pack of phonics sound mats is perfect for teaching phases 1 to 5 to your children.

There are illustrations on each phonics sound mat to engage children and help prompt the learning of different sounds. We frequently use these mats, saying the sound and naming the picture e.g. phase 2 ‘/s/ for socks, /a/ for apple’, phase 3 ‘/ng/ in ring, /ai/ in rain’.

Phonics Progression:

Phase 1 Phonics - EYFS children will develop their listening skills

Phase 2 Phonics - children will learn about phonemes and focus on the 19 most used single letter sounds, starting with s, a, t, p, i, n. Children are to learn the letter names alongside the sounds.

Phase 3 Phonics - children will learn around 25 less common phonemes and more tricky words like 'me,' 'was' and 'they'

Phase 4 Phonics - will help to hone a child's knowledge. The sounds on Phase 4 mat are not official phonemes, they are ‘consonant clusters’- regularly seen at the start or end of words.

Phase 5 Phonics - will usually take the whole of Year 1 and introduces other spellings for sounds and new graphemes. We move onto these in Reception for children that have solid knowledge of the phases above.

100 High Frequency words- the top 100 words your child will come across, to be learnt. Not all of these can be sounded out with phonics teaching, like the word ‘the’ we call these Tricky Words.