Phonics
Please visit our Phonics blog for more information
Useful information
Phonics presentation - Teaching and learning phonics at Chrishall Primary School
PHONICS GLOSSARY
Phoneme – The smallest unit of sound.
Grapheme – The way we write the sound.
Digraph – Is a grapheme containing 2 letter shapes which make one sound. For example – sh, ch, th
Trigraph – Is a grapheme containing 3 letter shapes which make one sound. For example – ear, igh, air
Split digraph – Is 2 letters that make one sound but they have been split up by a letter in between them.
For example a-e, e-e, i-e, o-e, u-e
Blending – Looking at each grapheme in a word and blending the sounds together to read the word.
Segmenting – Hearing a spoken word and splitting it into the phonemes that make it to spell the word.
Tricky Words – Some words cannot be sounded out or spelt correctly by listening for the sounds in them. These are called Tricky Words and have to be learnt and remembered as whole words. This is achieved through regular practise of reading and spelling such words and also by identifying which part of the word is ‘tricky’.
Alien Words – Also known as ‘Nonsense Words’ are words which are not real. By regularly looking at these kinds of words the children acquire a growing confidence in their ability to decode unfamiliar text. This is achieved by identifying any known graphemes within the word and then blending the sounds all through the word and merging them together to read it. It also gives us a clear idea of any children who may need extra help with grapheme recognition and blending skills.
Useful Links
A very useful site in which Mr Thorne goes through all the Phases in Phonics and you can listen to him articulating each of the sounds to hear how they should be pronounced. There are also lots of brilliant apps which can be downloaded and are beneficial for children in all Key Stages.
Click on this link for lots of great games which involve reading ‘real’ and ‘nonsense’ words, tricky words and high frequency words.
BBC Bitesize
Has lots of spelling games which are suitable for children in all Key Stages.