Helping my child at home: Phonics and Reading
(FFT - 2022)Our ambition is to enable success for all children and inspire a lifelong love of reading.
Phonics is a way of teaching children how to read and write by learning to associate letters or groups of letters with the sounds they represent. There are 44 main sounds in the English language. Each sound is represented by a grapheme (the written representation of a sound).
At South Walney Infant and Nursery School, we use “Success for All Phonics” (click HERE for more information) as our systematic synthetic phonic programme validated by the DFE. Synthetic phonics is a method of teaching where words are broken up into the smallest units of sound (phonemes).
Children are taught how to:
- recognise the sounds that each individual letter makes;
- identify the sounds that different combinations of letters make – such as /sh/ or /oo/;
- to blend these sounds together from left to right to make a word. to segment words into individual sounds
Please click on the image above to access helpful videos and tips for reading at home
Phonics Terminology
Your child will use a range of phonic specific vocabulary that they will very quickly become used to.
Helpful guidance for key terms used can be found HERE.
Letter Formation Cues
"When children learn to write lower case letters in the correct way, we use a short rhyme to help them remember how they should do this, e.g. for ‘s’ this is ‘Left around, right around, from head to tail.’ We want children to form their letters in the correct way as early as possible and prevent them from developing poor letter writing habits that will need to be corrected later."
Click HERE for the alliterative phrases and letter writing cues.
Saying the sounds
"For each of the phonemes spoken it is important the children articulate them clearly and precisely. Here is a video of how the sounds are correctly made.
Phonics Phrases
"For each of the Grapheme Phoneme Correspondences in Success for All Phonics we teach children a short alliterative phrase to help them to remember it, e.g. for ‘s’ we have ‘The snake slides and slithers.’ If your child is having difficulty in remembering a GPC, reminding them of the alliterative phrase might help. Helpful video guidance for this that can be viewed here."
Reading for pleasure
As well as supporting your child to learn to read by helping them apply their phonic knowledge, fostering a love of reading is crucial to their furture success. Parents and Carers play a vital role in promoting reading for pleasure and a love of sharing books in the home. The following links may be useful in helping you to do that.
Helping my child at Home
