Phonics
Phase | Phonic Knowledge and Skills |
|---|---|
| Phase One (Nursery/Reception) | Activities are divided into seven aspects, including environmental sounds, instrumental sounds, body sounds, rhythm and rhyme, alliteration, voice sounds and finally oral blending and segmenting. |
| Phase Two (Reception) | Learning 19 letters of the alphabet and one sound for each. Blending sounds together to make words. Segmenting words into their separate sounds. Beginning to read simple captions. |
| Phase Three (Reception) | The remaining 7 letters of the alphabet, one sound for each. Graphemes such as 'ch', 'oo', 'th' representing the remaining phonemes not covered by single letters. Reading captions, sentences and questions. On completion of this phase, children will have learnt the "simple code", i.e. one grapheme for each phoneme in the English language. |
| Phase Four (Reception) | No new grapheme-phoneme correspondences are taught in this phase. Children learn to blend and segment longer words with adjacent consonants, e.g. swim, clap, jump. |
Phonics Glossary
| blending | Blending is the skill of joining sounds together to read words. Children are taught to say the separate sounds in a word and to then blend them together to decode the word. |
| digraph | A digraph is a sound that is represented by two letters e.g. the sound 'a' in rain is represented by the digraph 'ai'. |
| grapheme | A grapheme is a visual representation of a sound e.g. a letter or a group of letters. Some sounds are represented by a single letter whilst others are represented by more than one letter. |
| phoneme | A phoneme is a unit of sound e.g. the word 'cat' contains three phonemes; c - a - t. |
| segmenting | Segmenting is the opposite of blending. Children are taught to segment a word into its separate sounds in order to spell it. |