Letters and Sounds

Training

Lenthall Infant and Nursery School

Wednesday 8th November 2017

What is the Letters and Sounds

programme? Letters and Sounds is designed to help practitioners and teachers teach children

how the alphabet works for reading and spelling by: fostering children’s speaking and listening skills as valuable in their own right

and as preparatory to learning phonic knowledge and skills; teaching high quality phonic work from nursery. The Letters and Sounds programme focuses on securing word recognition skills

as these are essential for children to decode (read) and encode (spell) words accurately with ease, and so concentrate on comprehending and composing text.

Terminology A Phoneme is a sound in a word. A Grapheme is a letter or a sequence of letters that represents a phoneme. A Digraph is a two letter grapheme which represents one phoneme. A Trigraph is a three letter grapheme which represents one phoneme.

What are Mnemonics and are they necessary? Mnemonics are memory aids and the best mnemonics are multi-sensory as in Jolly Phonics.

They conjure up the shape and sound of the letter. The letter ‘s’ is an excellent example it begins the word snake, it looks like a snake, it represents a snake like sound and when children write it they make a writhing snake like movement.

What is Sound Talk It is recommended to be introduced in phase 1, aspect 7 - Oral blending

and segmenting. It suggests that teachers and TA’s model sound talk when talking to

children. For example when giving instructions or asking questions the adult segments the last word into separate phonemes, e.g. It’s time to get your c-oa-t, coat! or Touch your t-oe-s, toes!

It suggests that a soft toy/puppet is introduced to the children that can only speak in sound talk.

The ‘simple view of reading’

Letters and Sounds is based on the ‘simple view of reading’ which identifies two dimensions of reading – ‘Word recognition’ and ‘language comprehension’.

In 2006 the review recommended systematic, ‘high quality phonic work’, as the prime means for teaching children to learn to read.

The review also emphasised the importance of fostering speaking and listening skills form birth onwards in the home environment, making full use of the rich opportunities to develop children’s language by using a multi sensory approach.

What are the 6 Phases in the

document? Phase One – Nursery Phase Two – Reception Phase Three – Reception Phase Four – Reception / Year 1 Phase Five – Year 1/Year 2 Phase Six – Year 2 Although the six-phase structure provides a useful map from which to

plan children’s progress, the boundaries between the phases should not be regarded as fixed!

Phase One Phase one is divided into 7 aspects; Aspect 1 General Sound discrimination – environmental sounds - DVD – Listening walks

Aspect 2 General Sound discrimination – Instrumental sounds – Which Instrument?

Aspect 3 General Sound discrimination body percussion Aspect 4 Rhythm and rhyme DVD – Rhyming Soup

Aspect 5 Alliteration

Aspect 6 Voice Sounds

Aspect 7 Oral blending and segmenting

Phase One Continued Each of the 7 aspects are broken down into 3 strands: 1. Tuning into sounds 2. Listening and remembering sounds 3. Talking about sounds

There is an emphasis on modelling oral blending and immediately give the whole word. For example, “I want you to p-a-t, pat your back”. After the modelling of

p-a-t you could ask the children to repeat the word pat. When children are used to oral blending, encourage them to count on their fingers

how many phonemes they can hear in each word. For example, p-i-g, d-u-ck It is very important to pronounce the phonemes very clearly and not to add an ‘uh’

to some e.g. ‘ssssssss’ and not ‘suh’, ‘mmmmmm’ and not ‘muh’ (See page 45 in the document)

DVD – Say the Sounds – Phase 2

Phase 2 Phase 2 teaches at least 19 letters and moves children on from oral blending and

segmentation with blending and segmenting with letters. By the end of phase 2 many children should be able to read some VC (Vowel

Consonant e.g. is, in, it, at etc and some CVC (Consonant-Vowel-Consonant) words, e.g. cat, sat, pin etc. Some children should be able to spell them using magnetic letters or by writing the letters down on paper, whiteboards or using chalk.

In each phase, except phase 1, children learn to read 100 high frequency words which are listed in appendix 1.

‘Tricky’ high-frequency words.

Phase 3 Phase 3 completes the teaching of the alphabet Children will be taught 42 of the Jolly Phonics Sounds by the end of this

phase, plus ‘ear’, ‘air’, ‘ure’, ‘ow’ and ‘igh’. Segmentation for spelling DVD. By the end of phase 3 children should be able to read the high-frequency

tricky words; he she, we, me, be, was , my, you, her and they. They should also be able to spell the high-frequency tricky words; the, to,

I, no and go.

Phase 4 By the end of phase 4 children should be able to identify 42 phonemes,

read CVC words and segment them for spelling. They will have some experience in reading simple two-syllable words. They will know letter names and be able to read and spell tricky words. The main purpose of this phase is to consolidate children’s knowledge of

graphemes in reading and spelling words which contain adjacent consonants and polysyllabic words.

See DVD – CVCC words - Reading

Phase 4 continued By the end of phase 4 children should; be able to hear and say any phoneme or grapheme previously taught in phases 2 and

3. be able to find any of the graphemes taught in phases 2 and 3 around the classroom

and school environment. For example, displays be able to blend and read words containing adjacent consonants be able to segment and spell words containing adjacent consonants be able to read the tricky words taught in phases 2,3 and 4 be able to spell the tricky words from phases 2 and 3 write each letter usually correctly.