Phonics Skills Guide (Ages 3-7) Phonics How to Use This Skills Guide

Phonics Skills Guide (Ages 3-7) Phonics How to use this skills guide

Our guides are designed to ensure the support you provide is targeted to the needs of your own child, ensuring their learning journey is unique to them.

Before starting to use this guide, establish where your child is now by making your own assessment or talking to their nursery/schoolteacher. They may fit the suggested age groups or be split across different ones.

You will find a ‘Steps to Success’ learning journey at the beginning. Use this for quick reference to establish which section of the document you need to access. Please only use those parts of the guide that fit your child’s current ability rather than read the whole document from start to finish.

In each section you will find a brief summary of what your child needs to know, questions to help extend their thinking and some fun, practical activities which can be used to learn and practise the skill you are working on.

At the end of the document you will find subject glossaries explaining current teaching terms and quick reference game ideas to further support your child’s education. What is phonics? Synthetic phonics is a reading and spelling strategy that teaches children specific individual ‘pure’ sounds (phonemes) and the letter symbols (graphemes) they correlate to. There are over 40 individual sounds in the English language, and these are mainly split into groups of 1, 2 or 3 letter symbols for example i, ie, igh.

Various schemes are used to teach phonics in different ways but predominantly children are taught the individual sounds first, using rhymes and songs, before then moving on to matching each sound to its letter symbol. As they become more secure with this stage, children begin to recognise these sounds and symbols in words. Then once they have developed a good knowledge of several sounds, children begin to break words down by identifying each sound, saying them out loud and eventually blending them back to together to form a word. This is called segmenting (to help with spelling) and blending (to help with reading). Simple three-letter cvc (consonant-vowel- consonant) words such as cat and peg start this process and help to build up a child’s confidence in reading. The more exposure to and experience they have of phonics, the more they will become confident in their own reading ability. This isn’t as easy as it sounds and for some children it can take quite a while to develop all the skills needed to be a successful phonetic reader.

What skills are needed to be a phonetic reader and speller? Children have to use a range of skills to become good phonetic readers. They need to be able to visually recognise a shape as being a letter symbol and have the memory recall to relate it to a specific sound. They also need to be able to identify and hear individual sounds in words and finally hear or be aware of the word they are trying to blend. To use their phonics in their writing, your child also needs to be able to remember how to form the letter symbols that make a particular sound. Each of these stages develops over time, so it is always best to find out the stage your child is at and support them as much as possible from this point. It is important to remember that some children may always find it challenging and find it easier to learn using a different strategy such as recalling words by sight.

Why is it important to teaching phonics correctly? For years individual sounds have been taught to children and used as part of a range of strategies to develop their reading ability. However, today’s phonics curriculum feels very different to the process that many parents experienced when younger. That is because there is now a much greater emphasis on teaching children the ‘pure’ way of saying the letter sounds. In general terms, this means removing the ‘uh’ sound you can hear when some letter sounds are spoken out loud. Try sounding out the letter ‘c’. Can you hear a slight ‘uh’ sound at the end? If so, then technically the sound has not been spoken in its purest form.

One of main reasons behind the focus on pure sounds is that some children find it more difficult to hear the word they are attempting to sound out when they add the ’uh’ to the end of letters, for example, sounding out ‘c-a-t’. If the ‘uh’ is emphasised on the letters ‘c’ and ‘t’ then some children will hear the word ‘cuhatuh’ rather than ‘cat’. This then makes it more challenging for them to blend the word correctly as some may think it is a word they haven’t heard of before.

We all want to help and support our children as best we can. One way that we can do this is by understanding the concept of pure sounds and supporting their phonics at home in the same way they are taught at nursery and school. Through reinforcing the individual sounds correctly whilst our children are decoding words, we can avoid any potential confusion for them in the classroom and for some, make their phonics journey a little easier. Steps to Success LEARNING JOURNEY

Age 3 Stage 1 Developing early listening skills using the environment and instruments

3-4

Stage 2 Developing an understanding of rhythms, rhymes, syllables and alliteration

Stage 3 Developing an awareness of initial sounds in words using voice sounds and adult modelling of sounding out words

4-5

Stage 4 Developing independence with individual ‘short vowel’ sounds (single letter sounds)

5-6

Stage 5 Fully confident in sounding out short vowel sounds and reading simple words. Developing an awareness of other sounds using digraphs (2 letter) and trigraphs (3 letter).

5-7

Stage 6 Confident with short and long vowel sounds and can identify alternative ways of reading and writing these sounds, including split digraphs.

Age 7 Stage 1 - (Age 3)

Teach Developing early listening skills is an important aspect of your child’s learning journey as it develops their awareness of the world around them and also supports their ability to share and work alongside others. To become a good reader, children first need to understand what language is, and how it is used to describe the world around us and communicate with others. The early stage of developing phonics encourages your child to tune into the world around them and listen carefully to what they can hear. Seeing if they can describe what they hear develops their vocabulary which you will see becomes vital as they move through the phonics stages.

Talk What sounds can you hear around you? Close your eyes, can you hear any more sounds? What noise does this animal or bird make? What instruments can you hear in this song? Which sounds are loudest/quietest?

Learn • Go on a nature hunt, stopping and listening in different places as you go

• Play a range of different music in the car or at home, encouraging your child to learn the words and actions and listen out for different instruments.

• Take time to find somewhere to stop with your child and encourage them to close their eyes to listen to what is around them

• Sound bingo with animal and instrument cards

• Copy my tune with instruments, beats to music and animal sounds

• Make own instruments using items around the home or recycled materials

What can you hear? Stage 2 - (Ages 3-4)

Teach Have you ever wondered why nursery rhymes and silly tongue twisters were such an important part of our childhood? Well it turns out they actually helped us to develop our early reading skills. Words are made up of rhythms because of the syllables they contain. Therefore, getting children to follow rhythms helps them to follow patterns in words at a later stage in their phonics development. Rhymes help children to pick up end sounds as they have the same repeating pattern whilst silly but entertaining alliteration tongue twisters like Peter Piper Picked a Pepper’ get children listening into and gaining an awareness of initial sounds (in this case the ‘p’ sound) as well as thinking about words that rhyme.

Talk Can you repeat this after me? What sound do all these words begin with? Can you think of other words that begin with a b? Peter Piper picked a What words rhyme with sat? Can you clap this pattern/beat with me? peck of pickled peppers.

Learn A peck of pickled • Sing lots of nursery rhymes and learn from memory peppers Peter Piper

• When sharing stories, model words that rhyme picked. and encourage your child to join in with familiar words in stories you read a lot.

• Learn tongue twisters and challenge your child to If Peter Piper picked a come up with their own peck of pickled peppers, • Clap along to songs and keep a beat using various parts of the body to keep it fun Where’s the peck of • Play ‘Ping Pong’ and challenge your child to clap the syllables in a word you give them. pickled peppers Peter Piper picked? Stage 3 - (Age 4)

Teach Once children have started to hear syllables in words and begin to identify start and end sounds in words e.g. c and t in cat, the next stage is for adults to model how we sound out words. This will help your child identify the remaining sounds in words and encourages them to begin to develop a skill called blending. This is where we put words back together again once they have been sounded out. For example, an adult can sound out the word c-a-t and the child then hears the word ‘cat’ and says it out loud. This can be done in lots of fun ways and often without your child realising they are developing their phonics skills e.g. using a robot voice or a teddy. At this stage, it becomes important as adults to develop our own awareness of the phonics sounds, especially as many of us were not taught this skill at school. It is also important to try and keep to simple, short 3 and 4 letter words to build up confidence before moving onto longer words.

Talk What sound can you hear at the start of this word? What sound can you hear at the end of the word? Can you hear any sounds in the middle? Shall we count together how many sounds I am saying in the word? What word do you think I am saying…m-a-t? Can you challenge yourself and sound a word out for me to guess?

Learn • Play ‘I-Spy’ but sound the word out instead e.g. I-Spy with my little eye a b-a-g?

• Talk in a robot voice when asking your child to do a task or question e.g. Can you see that f-l-a-g? Please can you pick up that b-a-g?

• Model teddy or puppet talk using sounding out and encourage your child to respond back in a conversation with you using the same skills e.g. introduce the puppet or teddy ‘Hi, my name is M-a-x, what is your name?

• Play games where you need to give clues in a silly voice e.g. Is it under the b-e-d?

Can you find it under the b-e-d? Stage 4 (Ages 4-5)

Teach This is the stage where children begin to learn the visual letter (grapheme) and match it with the sound it makes (phoneme). It is important here to remember this isn’t the names of the letters of the alphabet but the short sound the letter makes in cvc words like ‘c-a-t’ or ccvc words like ‘f-l-a-g’. The only time in the English language where the letter names are actually used are in words where we say the vowel name (the long vowel sound). At this development stage, these harder words tend to be avoided to enable your child to develop basic fluency with recognising and saying the letter sound. They will learn to segment the word for spelling (break it down into each sound) and then blend it back together for reading (say the whole word by putting the sounds together). There are 25 individual letter sounds to learn. Q is not included as it only comes as a digraph (two letter sound) as it is always paired with ‘u’ to make ‘qu’ in any word it is found in. Children may also begin to learn simple common exception words that they just have to know by sight as they don’t fit any phonetic rules. If your child takes a while for it all to click together, try not to worry as they will get there. It may be frustrating but sometimes their brains take a little longer to make the connections so plenty of time and patience is needed with each stage from here. Talk What sound can you spot at the beginning of this word? What sounds can you spot at the end of this word? What sound is in the middle of the word? Can you point to the ‘a’ sound? dog Can you put sound buttons on the word and tell me how many sounds it has? • • • Can you clap the sounds out as you say the word? What sound does this letter make? flag Learn • • • • • ‘Snap’ or ‘Memory Pairs’ game to develop sound recall Bingo game using words and sounds your child is learning

• Speed read – Who can read the most words on the cards against the clock

• ‘Silly sentences’ – Create a short sentence for your child to read to you

• ‘I-Spy’ – Use street signs to help children recognise letters in names etc e.g. I spy with my little eye, the ‘s’ sound

• Magnetic letters – Make simple words up for your child to read and encourage them to make one of their own once confident

• Fish a letter using foam letters – See if you child can identify the letterthey have caught

• Paint cvc words on stones or write words on card and bury them in the sand for your child to find Stage 5 (Ages 5-6)

Teach This is when phonics really starts to get tricky. Once children have mastered individual sounds it can be confusing for them to then start learning that, when a letter is placed next to another letter (forming a digraph), the sound they make could be completely different. Each school teaches the order of these differently, so follow the scheme they have adopted. More often than not, they start with the digraph sounds ‘sh, ch, th, ng’ as these create lots of new words for your child to start reading and encourages them to begin to recognise the two letters as one sound. This stage can either be quick for children to grasp or may take a while. The key is to focus on what your child knows to develop confidence and then begin to introduce one or two sounds they find tricky as a challenge for them. Quite often at this stage children will be introduced to nonsense words to help develop their phonetic decoding skills. These are also known as alien words or words that are not real. Try to use words that are up to 6 letters long when practising, as longer words require your child to recall a lot more sounds when blending them together. The stamina needed for longer words will come as they get more confident.

Talk How many letters are in a digraph? How many letters are in a trigraph? Can you show me how you would draw sounds buttons on this word to show its different sounds? Are there any digraphs or trigraphs in this word? Is the digraph/trigraph in this word at the beginning, middle or end? What sound does this digraph or trigraph make? How many digraphs/trigraphs can you spot in these words? high_ Learn • • Play ‘Bingo’, ‘Snakes and Ladders’, ‘Snap’ or ‘Memory Pairs’ games using words and sounds your child is learning

• Digraph/trigraph hunt in books to see which sound comes up the most

• ‘Peg Game’ – Which words can your child add to the washing line? sheep • Word sort – Write different words on sticky notes/pieces of paper _ _ • and underline the digraph/trigraph in each of them. Sort into piles of each sound

• Sorting real and nonsense words against the clock

This is substantial stage and can take a long time to become confident in. Stage 6 (Ages 5-7)

Teach At this stage children have become secure in understanding and recognising many of the digraphs and trigraphs in the English language. Once they have built up some fluency and accuracy, the final stage is to introduce them to the various ways sounds can be written. More often than not, this involves the long vowel sounds that have alternative ways of being written. It is at this stage children begin to develop a better understanding of split digraphs. These may have been introduced earlier but become secure at this stage. Split digraphs are what many of us called ‘magic e’ words when we were growing up. These are words where we don’t sound out the ‘e’ at the end of the word but know it changes the vowel sound near it e.g. cake. Words used to support children’s’ learning can become longer and contain more than two syllables to help reading stamina. Activities also become more focused on developing and securing application of phonics in children’s writing, making it a great stage to develop their independence and get them creating some of the activities and games they want to do. Having completed this stage, most children are said to be secure phonetic readers.

Talk What is a split digraph? plane Can you find me an example of a split digraph? How do you draw sounds buttons for split digraphs? How many ways can we write each of the long vowel sounds? • • • What sounds only have one way of writing it? Which sounds have the most alternative ways of writing them? Can you show me how to write the word …….? Can you write me a sentence using words with these sounds in? envelope Learn • • • • • • Make a word search using one long vowel sound string e.g. ai (rain), • ay (play), a-e (plane)

• Speed write - Create a grid for one long vowel sound and see how many words in 3 minutes your child can write and whether they remembered the correct spelling e.g. ie, igh, i-e

• ‘Memory Pairs’ game – This can be made more challenging by only writing out one copy of each word on a sticky note and asking your child to match the words by looking for the alternative spelling of the same sounds e.g. matching the long ‘a’ sound as in cake and train.

• Sorting real and nonsense words against the clock into piles of sounds or split digraphs

• ‘Snakes and Ladders/Bingo’ – Encourage your child to create their own using sounds they want to practise

• Sound hunt challenge – Whilst out and about who can find the most words on the sign containing a long vowel string e.g. Let’s hunt for all the different ways we can spot the ‘e’ sound written on signs and see if we can read the word Phonics Games Phonics Games

Snap Choose up to 10 sounds your child needs to learn (include ones they already know for confidence) and write them on a set of sticky notes or cut up paper. You will need two copies of each sound. Each of you takes turns to lay a word down and if they are both the same, the first person to shout ‘SNAP’, gets to keep both cards. Winner is the one with the most cards when all the cards run out.

Memory Pairs Choose 4 or 5 sounds that your child needs to learn (include a couple they already know for confidence) and write them on a set of sticky notes or cut up paper. You will need two copies of each sound. Lay each card out face down on the floor or the table and take turns choosing two cards to turn over. If they are the same card, then the player that turns them over keeps them. If they don’t match, then they are turned back over, and the next player takes a turn. Key skill is remembering where you saw the word last time it was turned over. Winner is the person with the most cards at the end of the game.

Peg Game This will need lots of pegs, a washing line and sound cards or sticky notes. First of all, think of 5 or 6 words that contain sounds your child needs to learn. Then on sticky notes or your own sound cards, write out each letter from the word, one letter per note/card. Next encourage your child to peg the different letter cards up on the washing line to make different words. Challenge them to identify the digraphs and trigraphs and peg these together on the line using one peg. Another challenge is to see if they can make other words that were not on your list. It doesn’t matter if these are shorter words or longer, it is about encouraging them to apply their phonics skills.

Copy My Tune With this game you can use your own body parts e.g. mouth, hands and feet. The aim is to get your child listening out for rhythms and beats and then encourage them to copy it back to you correctly. This is harder than it sounds for young children. Try starting with something simple like 4 slow claps and then gradually start to introduce more challenging patterns to copy. Alternatively, you can make animal noises, use real instruments or for added fun, get creative and make an instrument with your child.

Creative Letter Shapes Support your child’s recall of how different sounds look visually (graphemes) by having fun and asking them to make different letter (sound) shapes using items such as Lego, pasta, Playdough or recycled materials. Phonics Games

Ping Pong This game helps to develop your child’s ability to hear syllables in words. As player 1, you say a word to your child and they then have to clap the syllables back as they say the word e.g. picnic would have 2 claps (pic-nic). It is then the turn of your child to say a word and you say the word whilst clapping the syllables.

Silly Sentences Children love these whether it is reading them or having a go at writing their own. A silly sentence is one that doesn’t make any sense e.g. The goat said boo as he floated on a cloud.

I-Spy This game is great for developing phonics knowledge. Remember to always use the sounds for this game and not the alphabet letter names. You can challenge your child in lots of different ways and can vary it depending on what level your child is at. For example:

I spy with my little eye, a d-o-g. I spy with my little eye, something begging with ‘p’. I spy with my little eye, something ending with ‘t. I spy with my little eye, something that has a long ‘a’ sound in it.

Bingo / Snakes and Ladders Use our blank board games to help you target the sounds your child needs to learn. These games can be printed out and the sounds can either be handwritten directly on them or on sticky notes. Sticky notes enable the sounds to be changed during a game.

Snakes & Ladders

41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50

Finish 40 39 38 37 36 35 34 33 32 31

21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30

20 19 18 17 16 15 14 13 12 11

1 23 45 67 89 10

Start

Alliteration This is when a series of words next to or near each other begin with the same letter e.g. Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers

Body percussion Using the body to make different sounds like instruments e.g. clapping hands, clicking fingers, using vocal sounds, stomping feet or patting legs/face etc

Common Exception Words These are words that children need to learn but cannot yet decode as they don’t fit the phonics rules they have learnt so far or have unusual phoneme-grapheme correspondence e.g. she, put, said. These words often have to be learnt by sight.

Consonant A speech sound that is not one of the 5 vowels in the English Alphabet.

Consonant Diagraph These are two or three consonants placed together to make one single sound e.g. sh, ch, scr

Decoding This is the process of being able to apply letter/sound knowledge to correctly pronounce a printed word.

Diagraph These are groups of two letters that when placed together create one single sound e.g. ey, ie, oo

Environmental sounds These are sounds that occur in our surroundings e.g. from transportation, nature, people

Grapheme Graphemes are the written forms of individual sounds in our speech (phonemes). These can be made up of 1, 2 or 3 letters groups together e.g. a, ch, igh

Graphic Phoneme Correspondence (GPC) This can also be known as letter-sound correspondence and relates to identifying the relationship between the written letter (grapheme) and the individual sound (phoneme) and being able to match the two together.

High Frequency words These are words that occur most often in written language. These can be phonetically decodable or common exception words e.g. the, you, on, dad

Instrumental sounds These are the range of sounds that can be produce when playing a musical instrument.

Long vowel sound A long vowel sound is when the vowel in a word is pronounced the same as the name of the letter e.g. oe in toe or a_e in cake.

Oral Blending This is the process that occurs after oral segmenting and involves putting the individual sounds back together again to make a word e.g. b-i-g = big

Oral Segmenting This is the process of breaking down words into their smallest unit of sound (phonemes) or syllables.

Phoneme This is the smallest unit of sound in speech and is represented by a grapheme (an individual or groups of letters that when placed together create a single sound) Glossary

Rhyme This is a repetition of sounds between words or endings of words often found in poetry to create rhythm or effect.

Rhythm A regular, repeated pattern of sound or movement. In words this is often caused by stressed and unstressed syllables.

Short vowel sound This is when a vowel is not read as its letter name. Whilst it is not always three letter words that create this, they provide the easiest example e.g. The word fun is not pronounced with the ‘u’ letter name and uses the short ‘u’ sound.

Split diagraph This is when a two-letter diagraph that creates one sound is split by a consonant letter e.g. a_e in cake. This was once taught as the ‘magic e’ rule.

Syllables This is the number of times you hear a vowel sound in a word. Two vowels may be next to each other e.g. ai but if they only make one sound this will count as one syllable. They are often taught to children as beats in words to help with decoding skills.

Trigraph This is a group of three letters that when placed together make a single unit of sound.

Voice sounds A sound produced by humans using their lungs and voice box. This may not always be words but can be a range of sounds including laughter, babble and whispering.

Vowel A vowel is a letter in the alphabet that has more than one unit of sound or can also be silent. There are 5 vowels in the English Alphabet a, e, i, o, u

Vowel diagraph/trigraph These are individual vowel sounds that are made by placing two or three letters together e.g. ee and igh

Further Resources (2019)

• Alphablocks on CBeebies • Geraldine the Giraffe on Youtube (Mr Thorne Does Phonics) • www.phonicsplay.co.uk • TeachTalkLearn Youtube Channel