Reception

Phonics

Parent

Information

Session

October 2019

Meeting objectives

• To have an overview of how we teach phonics at St George’s

• To look at cursive handwriting

• How you as parents/ families can help your child at home

• To answer any of your questions

•Children in the Foundation Stage aretaught phonics daily

•It begins with developing listeningskills, particularly discriminatingbetween sounds they can hear.

• The children are then taught tolisten to the sounds that differentletters make.

Phonics in Reception

• Go on a ‘listening walk’ with your childwhen you are outside – asking yourchild to identify different sounds theycan hear e.g. a bird, a train, a car.

• Objects in a bag – what can they hear?

• Teaching them Nursery Rhymes andsinging songs that rhyme.

• Playing music and allowing your childto move their body to the rhythm of themusic.

What can I do at home?

Make sounds using a range of props,such as running a stick along a fenceor tapping on a bin lid.

Alliteration is a lot of fun to playaround with. Your child’s name can be agood place to start, for example, say:‘Carl caught a cat’, ‘Jolly Jessie jumped’,‘Mummy munches muffins’.

What can I do at home?

Oral blending

Hearing a series of spoken sounds and • merging them together to make a spoken word – no text is used

• For example, when a teacher calls out b-u-s’, the children say ‘bus’

• This skill is usually taught before blending and reading printed words

Oral SegmentingThe reverse of oral blending

• hearing a spoken word and separating it into individual sounds

• For example, when a teacher calls out pig, the children say the sounds ‘p-i-g’.

• Let’s have a try!

Pronouncing the sounds

You need to be careful when you are saying the sounds with your child.

Take great care not to ad an –uh to the end of a sound as the children might blend the word incorrectly for example ‘t’ , j and p’

Learning what the letters look and sound like.

• This begins in Reception and the children are introduced to letters in sets (not in alphabetical order)

• They begin to blend and segment using these letters

s a t p i n• Can you think of some words we can

make using these letters?

•Lets go through the short, single soundstogether and the corresponding actions!

What can I do at home?

• Try breaking down simple words when you are giving instructions or asking questions, such as ‘Can you find your h-a-t hat?’ ‘Sit on the s-ea-t seat’.

• Find real objects around your home that have three phonemes (sounds) and practise ‘sound talk’. First, just let them listen, then see if they will join in, for example, saying:‘I spy a p-e-g – peg.’‘Simon says – put your hands on your h-ea-d.’

What can I do at home?

• Buy magnetic letters for your fridge or foam letters for in the bath. Find out which letters have been taught so far – have fun finding these with your child.

• Make words together, for example, it, up, met, sat. As you select the letters, say them aloud: ‘a-m – am’, ‘m-e-t – met’.

• Also do it the other way around: read the word, break the word up and move the letters away, saying: ‘met – m-e-t’.

Blending

We blend letters in words in order to read:-

b-e-d - bed

Segmenting We segment words into graphemes in order to write:-

ie:- man - m-a-n

But it’s not that simple!

Sometimes 2 letters make one sound

This is called a ‘digraph’.

For example in the word boat there are 4 letters but 3 sounds b-oa-t

Try this now with the word farm. How many times does your mouth change shape?

• We often use the idea of sound buttons with the children. Give

your child a word and ask them to write the sound buttons

underneath. A small circle indicates a single sound and a large

oval represents a digraph. For example

octopus rainbow

Sound Buttons

• We also use these phoneme frames as a strategy to help children distinguish between different sounds in a word. One sound fits into a box for example

• Draw a phoneme frame if your child is struggling to spell a word. Remember the number of boxes matches the number of sounds in a word and NOT the number of letters.

• Encourage your child to put in the sounds they already know.

Phoneme Frame

b oa t

• It is really important that children learn the names of the

letters as well as the sounds they represent. By the end of

Foundation Stage children are expected to know and be able to

use both sounds and letter names.

• When segmenting a word like shop sh-op it has 3 sounds but 4

letters. Children must refer to sh as the sound and not s-h

when blending and segmenting. Similarly the word boat b-oa-t

has 3 sounds but it has 4 letters.

Important points to remember

• Sometimes the same letters are pronounced differently for example

bread and seaor

chin school chef

The children will then use the context of what they are reading to

work out the correct sound

Important points to remember

• Sometimes the same sound is spelt differently

play, rain, lane, great, straight,eight, fete, they

Important points to remember

Some words cannot be sounded out

These are called ‘common misconception words’

words.Children learn them by sight. Flashcards Magnetic words Tricky word bingo Point them out in the

environment

Useful websites and apps to help your child at home.

www.lettersandsounds.co.ukinteractive games and resources

Mr Thorne does phonicsClips available on You Tube

Phonicsplay.co.uk interactive games

https://www.nessy.com/uk/apps/hairy-phonics-1/interactive games

https://www.teachyourmonstertoread.com/

• Espresso has a fantastic

section on Phonics with

video clips for each

individual sound.

• At St Georges we use the cursive style of handwriting. We have

found that this style has had a huge impact on the quality of

handwriting across the school.

• We teach the children to write every letter with an entry and

exit stroke. This is a much better foundation for teaching joined

handwriting as they get older. Children are taught that

every letter starts on the line

Handwriting