Phonics at Greenvale Infant & Nursery School
Phonics refers to a method for teacher children to read and write. Phonics involves teaching children how to connect the sounds of spoken English with letters or groups of letters (e.g. that the sound "k" can be represented by a "c", "k" or "ck" spellings).
As of September 2006, the Government policy for teaching reading in all schools is synthetic phonics. The synthetic part means to synthesise, to put together, or to blend sounds together to make words. From the earliest stages of learning to read, children are encouraged to work out unknown words by blending the sounds together. This is what good readers do when they encounter a wod that they have not met before.
Children in Greenvale Infant & Nursery School are taught from the Nursery onwards the skills of recognising and discriminating between sounds. As our children move into Reception, Year 1 and Year 2, children are taught to recognise each letter by it's sound, to blend sounds together, to segment words into individual sounds for writing and to manipulate/change sounds within words e.g. to change "bit" to "bat".
There are 44 sounds in the English language and only 26 letters so that means that some sounds have to be represented by two or more letters together e.g. "ee" (see), "sh" (wash), "eigh" (eight).
Sounds may be represented in more than one way e.g. the letter "o" when written can represent the sound "o" as in "Bob" or "oe" as in "so".
Progression of Skills taught in Greenvale Infant & Nursery School
1. English speech is written in visual code where symbols, known as letters, are used to represent individual sounds (one at a time, from left to right across the page).
2. Each sound may be represented by 1, 2, 3 or 4 letters e.g. f (fix), s (hiss), i (night)
3. Sounds may be written in more than one way e.g. the sound "ae" can be written as "ai" (rain), "ay" (day), "ea" (break), "a-e" (plate), "a" (Amy), "ei" (rein), "ey" (they), "eigh" (eight).
4. Some symbols (letters) may represent more than one sound e.g. the letter "y" can represent the sounds "ee" (Betty), "ie" (cry), "y" (yet), "i" (myth)
For further information on Phonics and help with "say the sounds", please click here to visit the Oxford Owl website. You will also find fun interactive games on this website to work through with your children at home.
Please speak with your child's class teacher for more information about Phonics at Greenvale Infant & Nursery School.
Please click here to watch a short video about Phonics.