What is phonics? There has been a huge shift in the past few year in how we teach reading in UK schools. This is having a big impact and helping many children learn to read and spell. Phonics is recommended as the first strategy that children should be taught in helping them learn to read. At the end of Year 1 all children are tested on their phonics knowledge.
Phonics is one method of teaching children how to read and write.
It's all about sounds. There are 44 sounds in the English language, which we put together to form words.
Some are represented by one letter, like 't', and some by two or more, like 'ck' in duck and 'air' in chair.
Children are taught the sounds first, then how to match them to letters, and finally how to use the letter sounds for reading and spelling.
Synthetic phonics refers to 'synthesising', or blending, the sounds to read words. It's based on the idea that children should sound out unknown words and not rely on their context.
Click on the link below to have a look at an example test. Some words are made up (Alien) and others are real.
Phonics at The Mary Howard
We use the Little Wandle phonics programme in Class 1.
Little Wandle Letters and Sounds Revised is a complete systematic synthetic phonics programme (SSP)
developed for schools by schools. Based on the original Letters and Sounds, but extensively revised to
provide a complete teaching programme meeting all the expectations of the National Curriculum, the Ofsted Deep Dive into reading and preparing your children to go beyond the expectations of the Phonics Screening Check.
Phonics is taught daily in fun, engaging sessions and learning is constantly reinforced.
For Reception and Year 1 pupils reading sessions take place twice per week focusing on decoding (understanding vocabulary), prosody (expression and intonation) and comprehension (understanding texts).
Children will bring home two books – a fully decodable reading book matched to their reading ability and a sharing book to develop reading for pleasure together.
The following link will take you to the Little Wandle website -https://www.littlewandlelettersandsounds.org.uk/resources/for-parents/
