Phonics at Greenvale Primary School
School Closure Support:
During this period of school closure due to the coronavirus, the Department for Education have made access available to online daily phonics lessons which can be accessed with the link below:
Letters and Sounds for home and school - the DfE YouTube channel offering daily phonics sessions aimed at Reception and Year 1 children.
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCP_FbjYUP_UtldV2K_-niWw
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. (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 that the letters make together. This is what readers do when they encounter a word that they have not met before.
Children at Greenvale Infant & Nursery School are taught, from the Nursery onwards, the skills of recognising and discriminating between sounds. As children move into Reception, Year 1 and Year 2, they are taught to recognise each letter by it's sound and name, to blend sounds together for reading and to segment words into individual sounds for writing.
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
At Greenvale Primary School, we follow the progression in skills from the 'Letters and Sounds' programme (link below).
For further information on Phonics please click here to visit the Oxford Owl website. You will find fun interactive games on this website to work through with your children at home.
Please click here to watch a short video about Phonics and for help with how to 'say the sounds'.