Phonics & reading at Simon Balle

November 2015

How do we teach the children how to read?

Common comments around reading

Why do we have books with no words in it?

What am I supposed to do?

Why hasn’t my child had their book changed today?

This book isn’t challenging enough!

How is this teaching them to read?

Why are wordless books so important?

So why do we do it?

• Developing language• Prompting imagination• Having a conversation- also imagining what the characters

would be saying, they speak too.• Sharing familiar stories• Forming an opinion about the characters and their

thoughts of the text. Do they like it? What was their favourite part?

• Predicting what will happen next• The children who are learning to read, can’t get anything

wrong!

So how can you develop this?

So how can you develop this?

Write labels for the pictures.

How do we teach the children to read and write?

At Simon Balle, we follow the Letters and Sounds phonics resource published by the Department for Education and Skills in 2007. It aims

to build children's speaking and listening skills in their own right as well as to prepare children for learning to read by developing their

phonic knowledge and skills. It sets out a detailed and systematic programme for teaching phonic

skills for children starting by the age of five, with the aim of them becoming fluent readers by age seven.

Phase One

The importance of getting off to a good start cannot be overstated.It provides a broad and rich language experience for children.

This phase is designed to help children:

1. listen attentively2. enlarge their vocabulary3. speak confidently to adults and other children4. discriminate phonemes5. reproduce audibly the phonemes they hear, in order, all through

the word6. use sound-talk to segment words into phonemes

The ways in which adults interact and talk with the children are critical to developing children’s speaking and listening.

Activities are planned around 7 aspects of learning:

Aspect 1: General sound discrimination- environmental soundsAspect 2: General sound discrimination- instrumental soundsAspect 3: General sound discrimination- body percussionAspect 4: Rhythm and rhymeAspect 5: AlliterationAspect 6: Voice soundsAspect 7: Oral blending and segmenting

Phase Two

Phase 2 marks the beginning of systematic, high quality phonic work.

Throughout the phase, children are taught sets of letters. They are taught these as phonemes (the sound that it makes).

Set 1: s a t pSet 2: i n m d

Set 3: g o c k Set 4: ck e u r

Set 5: h b f,ff l,ll ss

Children are taught to read two- syllable words and simple captions. They will also learn to read some high frequency ‘tricky’ words:

the, to, go, no

Sequence of a phonics lesson:

Revisit and reviewPractise previously learned letters

TeachTeach a new letter

Teach blending and/or segmentation with lettersTeach one or two tricky words

PractisePractise reading and/or spelling words with the new letter

ApplyRead or write a caption using taught letters and words

The Fun Bit – applying what you know

soptellpatsitsockmapmepattidthick

sop

Phase Three

Children entering Phase 3 will know around 19 letters and will be able to blend to read VC words like a-t and segment to spell VC words it.

The purpose of this phase is to teach another 25 graphemes.

Set 6: j v w xSet 7: y z,zz qu

ch chin sh shop th then/thin ng ring ai rain ee feet igh

night oa boat oo boot/look ar farm or form

ur hurt ow cow oi coin ear dear air fair ure sure er

corner

Sequence of a phonics lesson in Phase 3:

Revisit and reviewPractise previously learned letters or graphemes

TeachTeach new graphemes

Teach one or two tricky wordsPractise

Practise blending and reading words with a new GPCPractise segmenting and spelling words with a new GPC

ApplyRead or write a caption or sentence using one or more tricky words

and words containing the graphemes.

Other information

Children are taught the letter formation during the teaching of a phoneme…

We encourage a cursive script wherever possible and this is modelled at school.

It helps the children to join fluently!

The expectation of the new curriculum in Year One is far higher than ever before. Children are now expected to be secure at phase 4 by the end of reception.

Phase 4 is short consolidation of all phases taught so far.

Another phonics workshop will follow next year with further information about assessment and the curriculum.

Have a go at home:

How many phonemes are in each word? How many in each sentence?

The cat got stuck on the roof.

Is it a sock or a slipper?