Phonics
Reading is the gateway skill that makes all other learning possible.
Barack Obama
At Ashton Vale, we use Unlocking Letters and Sounds as our phonics programme.
Unlocking Letters and Sounds is a phonics programme which aims to build on children’s speaking and listening skills as well as preparing children for learning to read by developing their phonic knowledge and skills.
Our phonics teaching starts in EYFS, with the aim of all children becoming fluent readers as they move into Key Stage 2.
PURE SOUNDS
It is really important that the children are saying all sounds as ‘pure sounds’ (ie not saying an ‘uh’ sound on the end).
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Careful pronunciation of the sounds is really important. It will help your child to hear each sound in a word much more easily. This will then help them to read and write that word more accurately.
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PROGRESSION
Unlocking Letters and Sounds Programme is broken down to teach sounds in a certain order. These are set out in the progression document below.
/docs/unlocking_letters_and_sounds_progression_document.pdf
PHONICS TERMS
Phoneme- the individual unit of sound in a word. The English language contains 44 different sounds.
Grapheme- the letter or group of letters that visually represents the phoneme (sound).
Digraph- 2 letters which represent 1 sound, for example: ck, ch, sh, th, ng
Trigraph- 3 letters representing 1 sound, for example: ear, air, ure, igh
Blending: merging the individual sounds (phonemes) to say a word. For example: c-a-t, cat or th-i-n, thin.
Segmenting- the skill of recognising the individual sounds (phonemes) needed to spell and write a word.
Decode- work out and read a word.
Vowel- short vowel sounds: a, e, i, o, u long vowel sounds: ai, ee, igh, ow, oo
High Frequency Words- words which occur most often in English some of which cannot be sounded out phonically. Your child will learn these in sequence and you may see them abbreviated as HFW or called ‘tricky’ or ‘key’ words.
Tricky words- these are words which don’t follow phonic rules. Your child will be unable to use their phonic skills to sound them out and blend so they will need to learn to recognise the word and say it (whole word recognition). For example: said, have, was, any, once.
