Phonics

"Phonics is making connections between the sounds of our spoken words and the letters that are used to write them down."

At Sharneyford, early reading is taught using Red Rose Phonics. During their phonics sessions, the children are systematically taught the sounds of each letter or combination of letters that help build words. As your children begin to learn letter sounds and begin to blend words, your child will have access to reading books. These books are numbered. These correlate directly to the sounds that your child knows. Children will move onto higher numbers as they are introduced to more letter sounds. The children are unable to move onto other books if they have not yet been introduced to the sounds that will be inside these books. 

Within our phonics lessons, the children are usually new sounds each week (with a revision lessons included). Red Rose Phonics also has consolidation weeks which revisit previously taught sounds. 

Terminology

As your children begin their phonics lessons, they will be encouraged to use the correct terminology. These words are used by all staff within school in all phonics lessons and so your child might use these at home. Using the correct phrases at home can support your child further with consistency in their learning. The terminology used is as follows: 

Phoneme - the smallest unit of sound that can be identified in words. These are sometimes referred to as 'sounds'. 

Grapheme - a letter or group of letters that are used to represent a particular phoneme when writing

Digraph - a grapheme that uses two letters to make one sound (ai, ee, or)

Trigraph - a grapheme that uses three letters to make one sound (igh, ear)

Split vowel digraph - a diagraph representing a vowel sound where the two letters are split by an intervening consonant (a_e as in take)

Blend - to combine individual phonemes into a word. 

Segment - to identify each of the individual sounds in a word working left to right. 

Tricky words - high frequency words that, although decodable in themselves, cannot be decoded by children using the grapheme-phoneme correspondence or sound-letter relationship (GPCs) they may have been taught up to that point. 

Assessments

Children are assessed regulary to ensure that their progress is monitored and also any difficulties or gaps are quickly identified. Should your child have any difficulties or through assessments, we notice some gaps in their learning, your child will access 'keep up' sessions. You will be notified of any difficulties or gaps that your child has as soon as assessments identify these. This allows you to be able to support your child and know that your child is recieving timely support when they require it. Should your child require additional support, this will be communicated to you and you will be notified of what additional support your child will be having within the school day or week. 

All pupils within Year 1 (or Year 2 if they have failed to achieve the standard within Year 1) will be assessed when completing the Phonic Screening in June each year. 

Reading books

The most important thing you can do is to read with your child and help them to develop a love of reading. Your child will bring home a reading book regularly. This book  will be 'fully decodeable' meaning that your child will have ben taught all the phonemes within every word and should therefore be able to fluently access the book.

You can read age appropriate texts selected because of a childs interests or a family members love for a book, etc. Shared reading with an adult alongside the fully decodeable books is fantastic. We believe it is SO important in fostering a love of reading with your child and enjoying shared time together. This will help their development so please read as often as you can - once a day if possible.