Phonics Skills Guide (Ages 3-7) Phonics How to Use This Skills Guide
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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 3 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 4 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.