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Phonics
"Train up a child in the way he should go; even when he is old he will not depart from it." Proverbs 22:6
What is phonics and why do we teach it?
Phonics is the study of sounds. Children are taught to read and write using phonics which is directly linking
phonemes (sounds in words) to graphemes (the letters). For example, in the word rain, we can split it into three separate sounds
r-ai-n
The 'ai' grapheme makes the sound 'A' . It can also be seen in words such as t-r-ai-n, and p-ai-n-t.
In the word 'p-l-ay' the A sound is made by the grapheme 'ay'.
Research shows that when phonics is taught in a structured way starting with the easiest sounds and progressing through the more complex sounds, it is the most effective way of teaching children to read. It is particularly helpful for children aged 5-7. Almost all children who receive good teaching of phonics will learn the skills they need to tackle new words. They can go onto read any kind of text fluently, confidently and for enjoyment.
At St Joseph's Catholic Primary School, we use Lancashire's Red Rose Phonics to teach phonics. This programme sets out a detailed and systematic programme for teaching phonics skills to children with the aim of them becoming fluent readers by the age of seven. It aims to build children’s speaking and listening skills in their own right as well as to prepare for learning to read by developing their phonic knowledge and skills.
Synthetic Phonics is the synthesizing, or blending of phonemes (sounds) to make a word, enabling children to read. Synthetic phonics is all the different ways each phoneme can be represented. Children are taught how to:
- blend phonemes in a word to read
- listen for phonemes in words to spell
- Irregular, high frequency words
- say the phoneme first and then the letter name
There are 6 overlapping phases. Below is a summary of the phases taught and some of our children demonstrating their fantastic phonics!
| Phase | Phonics Knowledge and Skills |
|---|---|
| 1 | 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. |
| 2 |
Learning 19 letters of the alphabet and one sound for each. |
| 3 |
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. |
| 4 |
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. |
| 5 |
Now we move on to the “complex code”. Children learn more graphemes for the phonemes which they already know, plus different ways of pronouncing phonemes they already know. |
| 6 |
Working on spelling, including prefixes and suffixes, doubling and dropping letters etc. |
What are High Frequency words?
High frequency words are common words, words that appear very often in written texts. They are a mixture of decodable words (words that can be sounded out) and tricky / exception words (words in which the English spelling code works in an unusual or uncommon way, which means the words have to be learned and recognised by sight).
It is really important that children learn how to read these words as they will make up a large proportion of the words they will be reading in everyday texts. They also need to learn to spell these words as they will find they will need to use them a great deal in their writing.
