Phonics
Phonics
At Cotgrave Candleby Lane School we use the Letters and Sounds programme to support the systematic teaching of phonics, developing children's reading and listening skills. The Letters and Sounds programme splits into six overlapping phases and begins right from Foundation 1, continuing across Foundation 2, Year 1 and Year 2.
The delivery of phonics are through consistent, effective and efficient daily 20-30 minute lessons.
We have put together some resources that will support the development of children's phonic knowledge and skills which you can use at home together. You will find these links to these resources in the appropriate star for each phase above.
If you have any questions about any aspect of phonics then please do contact your child's class teacher via email and they will happily answer these for you.
A guide to Letters and Sounds terminology
Before exploring the different letters and sounds phases, we have put together a few definitions that you may find useful to support the understanding of the Letters and sounds programme.
|
Term |
Definition |
|
Phonics |
Refers to a practice of teaching children how to read and write by focusing on the relationship between sounds and the letters (or groups of letters) that they are represented by in the English language |
|
Synthetic phonics |
Synthetic phonics refers to a particular method of teaching phonics where pupils are first taught the letter sounds in isolation before moving on to blending these sounds together to form full words. |
|
Phonemes |
Phonemes are the smallest unit of sound in a language. They are not segments of words like syllables but rather they are ‘speech sounds’ that can be combined to form words. There are 26 letters in the English language but there are 44 phonemes |
|
Grapheme |
A grapheme is a letter or a group of letters that spell a sound in a word. In other words a grapheme is a way of writing a phoneme |
|
GPC |
GPC stands for Grapheme Phoneme Correspondence and it refers to the ability to match a grapheme to its corresponding phoneme and a phoneme to its corresponding grapheme |
|
Digraph |
A digraph is a grapheme containing 2 letters that makes a single sound |
|
Trigraph |
A trigraph is a grapheme containing 3 letters that makes a single sound |
|
Blending |
Blending refers to the technique of assembling the individual sounds that comprise a particular word. |
|
Segmenting |
Segmenting refers to the ability to divide a word in to its various sounds. In particular this involves breaking a word down into the phonemes that make it, deciding which graphemes represent those phonemes and then writing them down in the correct order. |
|
Decode |
Decoding involves reading a word by saying and then blending its individual sounds. |
|
Syllable |
Syllables are the beats in a particular word when it is spoken. The words syllable consists of three syllables: syl-la-ble |
|
CVC |
CVC words are words that begin and end with a consonant phoneme and have vowel phoneme in-between. |