Reception Phonics

parent information

meeting

10th October 2019

Aims of the session

Understand what phonics is

Understand its importance in developing early

reading and writing skills.

How we teach phonics at HTP

Blending sounds for reading

Segmenting sounds for spelling

How to support your child at home

What is phonics?

Phonics refers to the sounds that letters make.

Letter sounds are far more important than

knowing letter names at this stage.

There are 44 phonemes (sounds) in the English

language. These can be represented in different

ways, some sounds have many variations in how

they are spelt.

How we teach a new sound

How we teach a new sound

Say some words and see if children can hear the newly taught sound:

sun, cat, lips, ship- where can you hear the sound?

Can you think of any words with the new sound?

Show the letter shape:

Look at some words with the ‘s’ in. Can you spot it?

sit

pot

has

sip

cats

Supporting reading at home

Sound out new words and blend the sounds in words

Oral blending

A book is not necessary to practise reading skills.

Blending is THE most crucial skill required to accurately

decode.

Practise ‘sound-talk’ or ‘robot-talk’ in conversations with

your child:

e.g. Can you pick up the ‘s-p-oo-n’?

I have ‘t-e-n’ pennies in my purse.

Tricky words

Some words are not spelt as they sound. We call these ‘tricky words’.

We have to learn how to spell these high frequency words.

Look at the word below, what part is tricky, which part is as it sounds:

said

How does phonics develop writing?

Children learn how to listen to sounds in words.

They will then try to attune themselves to decipher where

in a word they can hear a sound, how many sounds are in

a word and verbally break down a word into sounds.

Breaking down words into sounds is called ‘segmenting’.

Children learn to record the sounds in the order that they

hear them.

Initially, children will write phonetically. When they write

independently many words may be spelt wrong but they

are usually phonetically plausible.

Encourage your child to ‘mark make’. This is a prerequisite to early

writing.

Children need to be able to make big and small movements. Their

physical development is key to this.

Using paint brushes, crayons, chalk, their fingers to make patterns or

letter shapes in trays of rice or sand is useful.

Magnetic letters allow children to develop their ability to write

independently without having to form letters.

Talk about sounds in words, their own name and encourage them to

write these down.

Lower case letters rather than capitals at this stage.

Supporting writing at home

Our handwriting script

We use a pre-cursive font for writing.

All letters start from the line.