Systematic phonics is widely regarded as the most effective way to teach children to read. It also gives children the knowledge that they need to spell. The ultimate goal is that children will transition from slowly decoding (or sounding out) a word to rapidly recognising it. At Oakfield, we follow the Letters and Sounds guidance from the Department for Education. Phonics is taught daily throughout Saplings and Key Stage 1.

At the end of Year 1, all children will be required to take the Phonics Screening Check. This will include real and fake words, and tests the children’s ability to decode and blend using the 44 sounds that they have been taught.

More information is provided at our annual Phonics Evening in January.

Phonics Glossary

Blending – putting individual sounds together to make a word (eg. s-n-a-p when blended becomes snap)

Digraph – two letters used together to make one sound (eg. ck in clock, oo in book)

Grapheme – a group of letters that represent one sound

Phoneme – the smallest unit of sound in a word

Segmenting – breaking a word down into its component sounds

Split digraph - two letters that work together to make one sound but that are separated within a word (eg. the ‘ay’ in cake)

Trigraph – three letters used together to make one sound (eg. igh in light, air in hair)

Resources

You may be interested in the following resources:

This free online course designed for parents

Phonics Play – there are a variety of games to help children with decoding

Phonics Made Easy - information for parents

Alphablocks is a BBC programme based around phonics

Videos

Jolly Phonics alphabet song with actions

Introduction to phonics

How to pronounce letter sounds

Demystifying Digraphs - this video explains digraphs (sounds made with two letters, such as sh, or oo). It also shares the Jolly Phonics actions that the children learn at school for these sounds