Phonics

Step 1… The sounds of the letters

- For learning to read and write it’s more

important students grasp the sounds rather
than knowing the names of the letters

- When teaching the sounds be careful not to

add a schwa sound at the end (eg. ‘nnnn’ and
not ‘nuh’)
Step 1… The sounds of the letters
- There are 44 sounds (phonemes) to learn

- The Jolly Phonics programme breaks

them down into sets:

- A number of short simple words can be

written with s, a, t, p, i, n (see my resources)

Low, low, low and slow slow slow!

- It may take a long time

- You will have to repeat a lot

- Plenty of visuals

- Physical objects (eg. mini-whiteboards, laminated alphabets)

- Movement (eg. board race, stick ‘s’ to the wall, bring me the ‘m’ etc.)

- Personalise where possible

Activities for learning the basic sounds…

- Words beginning with (eg. ‘s’) in teams

- Using alphabet laminates for grab the letter (eg. bring me or show me the ‘s’)
- Board race, circle the letter (or the word beginning with)
- For testing: circle the correct sound that you hear
- Using pictures/flashcards drill vocabulary then identify first sound
- Repeat, repeat, repeat
- Once able to identify first sound, later move onto last sound/middle sound
Step 2… Blending (listen and recognise)
- Blending (or segmenting) the sounds together to form simple words
- For the sake of learning phonics these do not need to be real words
- Use lower case letters
- Start with only the short vowel sounds
- Start with CVC words
- At the beginning just recognising the first sound is good…
- Move onto recognising the last sound…
- And finally the middle!
- Elongate the words
- Practice, practice, practice
Eg. speaking & vocabulary lesson including phonics
- Use flashcards/photos etc. to drill vocabulary (eg. bath, sink, mat)
- Board a picture of one of these items, elicit the word
- Sound out the word (no writing)
- Get everyone to join in
- Put the gaps for the letters on the board hangman-style
- Select a lower level learner to tell you the first letter (encourage people not so
shout out obviously as the lower level ones need a chance to try!)
- Mid-level learner can tell you the last letter
- Higher level learners will be able to fill in the middle
- To make it somewhat meaningful ask ‘Do you have a ___ in your bathroom?’
& ‘What colour?’ - they can speak in pairs then feedback the answers
- (Obviously this moves into grammar have/don’t have but lends some
communicative purpose and allows them to use new words in context)
Step 3… decoding (look and recognise - read)
- As before, use lower case and short vowel sounds with CVC words

- Move onto CVCC or CCVC words as students become more proficient (eg.
consonant clusters)

- Use ‘decodable’ books to practice and build students’ confidence

Using decodable books
- Look at the pictures first
- Pre-teach vocabulary if it will be helpful
- Pre-teach or point out ‘sight’ words
- Read it once slowly, letting students try to decode themselves
- Read it again more quickly
- Finally read it again encouraging intonation and meaning
- Come back to it a week or two later
- Students can also listen to it being read
- https://www.oxfordowl.co.uk/api/digital_books/1394.html
Sight words
- Frequent words that cannot be phonetically decoded

- Students should try to learn them from memory

- Train students how to memorise these (look, cover, copy, check - repeat)

- https://jolly2.s3.amazonaws.com/Resources/Tricky%20Word%20ChecklistNEW.pdf
Vowels - short vowel sounds
- Teach the short vowel sounds first

- Focus on the shape of the mouth

- Associate with hand movements

- This takes a lot of practice…

- Vary activities (again, board race, mini-whiteboards, cups, laminates etc.)

Moving on… you can then teach:
● Vowel digraphs (ai, oa, ea… also ‘magic e’)
● Consonant digraphs (sh, ch, ck)
● Trigraphs (igh)
● Same letters sometimes make different sounds (eg. ‘ea’ makes dream and
meat but also head and bread)
● Same sounds sometimes are made with different letters (eg. ‘igh’ = light &
higher but also ‘ie’ = pie & fried
● More spelling rules (eg. ‘er’ ending, ‘le’ ending)
When two vowels go walking the first does the talking!

- When you see two vowels in one word…

- The second vowel is silent…

- The first vowel says its name.

- (There are exceptions)!

Useful tools
- https://www.skillsworkshop.org/pre-entry

- https://www.allaboutlearningpress.com/letter-sounds-app/

- http://www.theschoolhouse.us/charts/long_vowels.html

- https://www.teachyourmonstertoread.com/digital-flashcards