Seriously Cool English
Boost phonics confidence with Willow the puppy!
In Phase 1 phonics, children are taught about:
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Environmental sounds
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Instrumental sounds
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Body percussion (e.g. clapping and stamping)
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Rhythm and rhyme
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Voice sounds
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Oral blending and segmenting (e.g. hearing that d-o-g makes ‘dog’)
Typical activities for teaching Phase 1 phonics include 'listening' walks, playing and identifying instruments, action songs, learning rhymes and playing games like I Spy.
Phase 2 is intended to develop children’s listening, vocabulary and speaking skills.
They will also then be taught the grapheme-phoneme representations (letters) for 19 letters. Additionally, they will be taught that phonemes (sounds) can be represented by more than one letter. E.g. fin, huff
Children who are able to read very simple stories, they will still enjoy listening to stories while practising their own early reading skills at the same time.
Phase 3 & Phase 4 Letters and sounds
Boost phonics confidence with Willow the puppy
Phase 3
The purpose of this phase is to teach more graphemes; the remaining letters of the alphabet and some sounds of which are made up of two or three letters, known as digraphs and trigraphs. E.g. ‘ee’ as in bee
Practise blending and segmenting a wider range of CVC words.
Read more tricky words and begin to spell them.
To read familiar words on sight, rather than decoding them.
Phase 3 Introduces children to the remaining, more difficult and/or less commonly used phonemes. There are around 25 of these, depending on which scheme is followed, mainly made up of two letters such as /ch/, /ar/, /ow/ and /ee/.
We need these sounds to be able to read and form useful words.
Phase 4 The purpose of this phase is to consolidate the sounds already taught. Children are also exposed to adjacent consonants (consonant blends and consonant clusters) and multisyllabic words.
Boost phonics confidence with Willow the puppy!
Generally takes children the whole of Year 1.
Here, we start introducing alternative spellings for sounds, like 'igh'.
Children master these in reading first, and as their fluency develops, we begin to see them using them correctly in spelling.
Children learn new graphemes (different ways of spelling each sound) and alternative pronunciations for these: for example, learning that the grapheme ‘ow’ makes a different sound in ‘snow’ and ‘cow’.
They should become quicker at blending, and start to do it silently.
They learn about split digraphs (the ‘magic e’) such as the a-e in ‘name.’
They will start to choose the right graphemes when spelling, and will learn more tricky words, including ‘people,’ ‘water’ and ‘friend’. They also learn one new phoneme: /zh/, as in ‘treasure.’
PHASE 5 QUICK ACTIVITIES
Phase 6
Phase 6 phonics takes place throughout Year 2, with the aim of children becoming fluent readers and accurate spellers.
By Phase 6, children should be able to read hundreds of words using one of three strategies:
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Reading them automatically
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Decoding them quickly and silently
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Decoding them aloud
Children should now be spelling most words accurately (this is known as 'encoding'), although this usually lags behind reading. They will also learn, among other things:
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The past tense
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Memory strategies for high frequency or topic words
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Proof-reading
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How to use a dictionary
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Where to put the apostrophe in words like ‘I’m’
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Spelling rules
Although formal phonics teaching is usually complete by the end of Year 2, children continue to use their knowledge as they move up the school. ‘The whole aim of phonics teaching is not just to learn the sounds, but to use them as a tool for reading and spelling,’ explains Sara. ‘Everything leads on to independent reading and writing.’