Phonics Information for Parents

Phonics is the method of teaching we use at Havergal to teach your child how to read.

Children are taught to recognise the sounds (phonemes) made by letters (graphemes)

Initially, children learn to recognise single letter sounds a-z.

It is important that the sounds the children use are ‘pure’ sounds.  Pure sounds can be seen in this link below.

They then learn to blend the letter sounds (Phonemes) together to read words. Your child might refer to this as ‘Sound it out’

Example

c-a-t = cat

Next, the children are taught that some sounds can be made by two or three letters together. These are called digraphs (Two letters) and trigraphs (Three letters)

For example

ai  –   as in snail

igh – as in light

Finally the children are taught about split digraphs. A split digraph is a digraph that is split by a consonant. Usually a long vowel sound, e.g. ‘a-e’ (cake), ‘i-e’ (five), ‘o-e’ (code), ‘e-e’ (sphere) and ‘u-e’ (rule).

At Havergal, we follow the Twinkl Scheme. The overview can be viewed by clicking on the link lower down on this page.

Not all words are phonetically decodable.  Some words children need to learn through the ‘sight words’ method of learning. Sight words is when you learn to read by memorising 1,000’s of words individually.  Your child may refer to these as ‘Tricky Words’

We will offer Reception parents the opportunity to attend a phonics meeting  in Autumn  and Year 1 parents a meeting in Spring to discuss the National Phonics Screening Test which takes place in June of each year for all Year 1 pupils.  Please see the PowerPoint below for additional information about the National Phonics Screening Check.

Progression in Phonics Guide

Parents guide to the National Phonics Screening Check