Phonics Information

 

Although we have phonics sessions 1-2 times during the school day, there are many ways that parents/carers can support phonics learning at home too. Here are some of our helpful tips for phonics:

• read as much as you can both with and to your child - this will help them to recognise the sounds they have learnt in lots of different words and give them chance to practise sounding out new words,
• encourage your child to have a good guess at a word, even if they get it wrong
• if your child is struggling to read a word, get them to 'use their sounds' and break it up. They can then have a go at blending all the sounds together to make a word they might recognise, e.g. d-o-g, dog.
• discuss word meanings with your child, this will help them to remember the word next time.

 

Below are links to useful websites that will help both parents and children to understand and use phonics when reading. If you have any queries about phonics, please don't hesitate to ask a member of the year 1 team! Happy reading!

Phonics

Phonics is the systematic teaching of the sounds, or ‘phonemes’ that accompany the written letters ‘graphemes’. It is designed to teach children to become confident and fluent readers in English. 

All children in Early Years and Key Stage 1 have a 20 minute phonics session every day where they are introduced to new sounds and practise the sounds that they are familiar with.

At St Richards we follow ‘Letters and Sounds’, published by the Department for Education, to teach phonics. In Early Years we also introduce ‘Jolly Phonics’, which teaches actions to accompany the sounds and act as a memory aid. 

We use a wide variety of published material, including phonic reading books from our core scheme, 'Project X' and ‘Floppy’s Phonics’, ‘Jolly Phonics Readers’ and ‘Songbirds,’ to practise our phonics. These books are written so that the children are able to use their early phonic knowledge to read new words by sounding them out and blending those sounds together.

If you would like more information on ‘Letters and Sounds’ visit:
Letters and Sounds
(https://www.gov.uk)


Year 1 Phonics screening check

At the end of year 1, children will undertake a statutory phonics screening check. This is a short assessment to make sure that children have learnt phonics to an appropriate standard.

There are 40 words in the screening check which the children are asked to read on a one-to-one basis with their teacher. The check is made up of ‘real’ words (e.g. ‘mud’) and non-words (e.g. ‘splog’) and children need to apply their phonic knowledge to read all words. 
Preparation for the check takes place during the daily phonics session, but you can help your child at home by practising phonics on a regular basis.