Castercliff Primary Academy
Phonics
At Castercliff Primary Academy, we recognise that reading is a fundamental skill needed to ensure our pupils achieve successfully throughout their lives. Learning to read is one of the most important things children will learn at our school. Access to almost every other area of the curriculum depends heavily on it, and as a school we strive to ensure that every single child learns to read as quickly as possible.
We use the Lancashire 'Red Rose Letters and Sounds' as a systematic scheme. It is taught daily in discrete 20-minute sessions and phonics knowledge and skills are reinforced and applied across the curriculum through a multi-sensory approach.
What is Phonics?
Phonics is a way of teaching children to read quickly and skilfully.
They are taught how to:
- Recognise the sounds that individual letters make.
- Identify the sounds that different combinations of letters make-such as 'sh' or 'oo.’
- Blend these sounds together from left to right to make a word.
Children can then use this knowledge to 'decode' new words that they hear or see. This is the first important step in learning to read.
The children are taught to read words by blending, which means pushing all the sounds together to make a word. The children are taught to spell words by segmenting, which means sounding out words and writing down the sounds they can hear.
Words your child might use when talking about phonics:
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Phoneme |
Phonemes are the smallest unit of speech – sounds which make up a word. If you change a phoneme in a word, you would change its meaning. For example, there are three phonemes in the word sit /s/-/i/-/t/. If you change the phoneme /s/ for /f/, you have a new word, fit. If you change the phoneme /t/ in fit for a /sh/, you have a new word, fish – /f/-/i/-/sh/. |
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Grapheme |
Graphemes are the written representation of sounds – the letters. |
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Digraph |
A grapheme containing 2 letters that makes just one sound, eg /sh/ in shop or /ch/ in chip. |
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Trigraph |
A grapheme containing 3 letters that makes just one sound, eg /air/ in pair or /igh/ in night. |
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Split digraph |
A grapheme containing 2 letters but are separated by another sound, eg ‘ae’ in make is separated by the sound /k/ so it is split /a-e/. |
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Blend |
The process of putting individual sounds together to read a word, eg sh–o-p, shop. |
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Segment |
The process of breaking a word into individual sounds to spell a word. |
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Sound buttons |
Teachers might use these under words to indicate whether the sound is a single letter sound (dot) or a digraph/trigraph (dash) to help children to blend the sounds correctly in the word, eg shop |
For further information please contact the Phonics Leader - Rebecca Murton.