Early reading and Phonics lead: Mrs R Moorhouse
At Moon's Moat First school we strive to teach children to read effectively and quickly using the Floppy’s Phonics teaching programme. Phonics is a method for teaching reading and writing of the English language by developing learners' phonemic awareness. It includes the ability to hear, identify, and manipulate phonemes in order to teach the correspondence between these sounds and the spelling patterns that represent them. In addition to this, it also creates a platform for discussion and comprehension around texts. This structure of teaching uses the phonic levels, each with new phonemes to be learnt and increasing with difficulty as you progress through the levels.
We passionately believe that teaching children to read and write independently and as quickly as possible is one of the core purposes of our school. These fundamental skills not only hold the keys to the rest of the curriculum but also have a huge impact upon the children’s self esteem and future life chances.
We follow Floppy’s Phonics, a systematic synthetic phonics teaching programme for early reading and writing. We use the interactive phonics lessons and activities to teach children the sounds in words and the code (letters) used to represent them. Children in Reception and Key Stage 1 will take part in a daily phonics lesson. Each lesson begins by rapidly revisiting previously taught sounds and codes before being taught the next new sound. They will use the Floppy’s Phonics Sound Books to look for words which contain this new sound and discuss the meaning of any new vocabulary. They will practise forming the new code, reading words and sentences which contain it and complete spelling games too. This learning will transfer into their daily reading so children can apply and consolidate the new sound and code using the Oxford Reading Tree scheme.
At Moon's Moat First School we use Floppy Phonics to support phonics and the No Nonsense Spelling program to teach spelling patterns in Year 2, 3 and 4.
What are Phonics Phases/levels?
Levels are the way the Floppy Phonics Program is broken down to teach sounds in a certain order.
At the same time whole words that cannot be broken down easily, (we call “tricky words”) are taught to the children.
Alongside our programme, we use high quality resources for effective and consistent phonics teaching. Our children engage in fun, multisensory phonics lessons 5 days a week through EYFS to KS1. Children who haven't mastered phonics in KS2 will also take part in phonics lessons.
Click this link to see how we teach phonics and what we resources we use as part of our Floppy's Phonics programme.
To reinforce the phonics teaching in school, your child may bring home some books and activities to share with you. This includes:
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Fully decodable phonics book linked to the sounds/phase they are learning in school.
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Floppy Phonics Activity sheet
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Say the sounds poster
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Grapheme and picture tiles
Level One
(Nursery)
Activities are divided into seven aspects, including environmental sounds, instrumental sounds, body sounds, rhythm and rhyme, alliteration, voice sounds and finally oral blending and segmenting.
Level One Plus
Children learn 24 new graphemes. They begin to blend sounds to make words and segment words into separate sounds. These are made up of a selection of single letter sounds and digraphs (two letters that make one sound e.g. /ck/) Beginning to read simple captions. It is important that children learn the letter sounds to blend and segment. Watch the video below to help. Also try Mr Thorne's youtube videos here for help.
Level Two
Children learn 18 further graphemes. These are made up of a selection of single letter sounds and digraphs (two letters that make one sound e.g. /ch/) Reading captions, sentences and questions.
Level Three
Children learn 19 further graphemes. These are made up of a selection of digraphs (two letters that make one sound e.g. /ai/) and trigraphs (three letters that make one sound e.g. /ear/).
Level Four
Children learn to blend and segment longer words with adjacent consonants, e.g. stop, spin, jump.
Level Five
Children learn more graphemes for the phonemes which they already know, plus different ways of pronouncing the graphemes they already know.
Phonics Play is a fantastic website that has many resources like the one above. Click here for the website.
Other websites that you may find useful:
www.bbc.co.uk/schools/ks1bitesize
The correct articulation of phonemes is essential for children to be able to segment and blend accurately. Please watch the below video to see how this is done.
What are “Tricky words”?
Tricky words are words that cannot be ‘sounded-out’ but need to be learned by heart. You will find a list of these in your child's reading diary. Use the links below for more information.
Useful high frequency and tricky words
High frequency and tricky words SPELLING POSTERS
What do the Phonics terms mean?
Phoneme: The smallest unit of sound in a word, e.g. c/a/t, sh/o/p, t/ea/ch/er.
Grapheme: A letter or group of letters representing one sound, e.g. sh, igh, t.
Clip Phonemes: when teaching sounds ,always clip them short ‘mmmm’ not ‘muh’
Digraph: Two letters which together make one sound, e.g. sh, ch, ee, ph, oa. (Here we use the letter names to describe them)
Split digraph: Two vowels which work as a pair, split around a consonant, to represent one sound, e.g. a-e as in cake, or i-e as in kite.
Trigraph: three letters which together make one sound but cannot be separated into smaller phonemes, e.g. igh as in light, ear as in heard, air as in chair.
Segmentation: means hearing the individual phonemes within a word – for instance the word ‘crash’ consists of four phonemes: ‘c – r – a – sh’. In order to spell this word, a child must segment it into its component phonemes and choose a grapheme to represent each phoneme.
Blending: means merging the individual phonemes together to pronounce a word. In order to read an unfamiliar word, a child must recognise (‘sound out’) each grapheme, not each letter (e.g. ‘th-i-n’ not ‘t-h-i-n’), and then merge the phonemes together to make the word.
Mnemonics: a device for memorising and recalling something, such as a hand action of a drill to remember the phoneme /d/.
Adjacent consonants: two or three letters with discrete sounds, which are blended together e.g. str, cr, tr, gr. (previously consonant clusters).
Comprehension: understanding of language whether it is spoken or written.
All of our teachers are skilled phonics teachers, so please ask if you like any help or advice. Mrs Moorhouse is the English Lead and is also available to help you and your child.
By the time children leave ks1 and progress into ks2, children have a good understanding of the alphabetic code and have become confident resourceful readers and writers who reflect upon their learning. Children have met to a wide variety of texts, both from their own individual reading as well as those shared with the class. As a result, children have a thirst for reading and are able to participate in discussions, ask probing questions and apply their skills across the curriculum.
Throughout the teaching of Floppy’s phonics we are able to measure their attainment after each level and provide children with correct additional support to either help embed their learning or provide them with the next level of challenge. In addition, we are able to see the impact of this programme with their progress in the Year One phonics screening check. We are able to use all this to make sure that the teaching of good synthetic phonics continues to follow those children that need it throughout their primary education.