Learning Phonics

 First, your child will be taught the most straightforward letters and the sounds they make. For example, they will be taught that the letter ‘m’ represents an mmm sound.

In phonics we use the word grapheme to talk about the letters on the page and phoneme to talk about the sounds those letters represent.

Next, they will learn how sounds can be put together (blended) to make words. For example, they will learn that the sounds of the letters ‘m-a-t’ blend together to make the word ‘mat’.

Then the children will really start to read! They will learn to recognise the different letters or pairs of letters (graphemes) in a word, say the separate sounds (phonemes) slowly, then put (blend) them together. For example, they will be taught that the word ‘boat’ can be separated out (segmented) into ‘b-oa-t’ which represents the sounds bbb-oh–ttt. They can blend these sounds into the word ‘boat’.

In phonics we use the word decode to talk about reading a single word. We use the word segment to talk about breaking a word down into separate sounds and blend to talk about putting the sounds together to make a word.