Teaching Early Phonics Skills At Yealmpstone Farm

At YFPS we use Read Write Inc resources to support your child's learning. Our reading books reinforce the sounds children are learning in the classroom. The smallest unit of sound is called a phoneme and your child will be taught about these as part of their phonics learning journey. The teacher will explain phonemes and how you can help your child when they are starting to put sounds together at home.

Children are taught letter sounds in Foundation. This involves thinking about what sound a word starts with, saying the sound out loud and then recognising how that sound is represented by a letter.

The aim is for children to be able to see a letter and then say the sound it represents out loud. This is called decoding.

Some phonics programmes start children off by learning the letters s, a, t, n, i, p first. This is because once they know each of those letter sounds, they can then be arranged into a variety of different words (for example: sat, tip, pin, nip, tan, tin, sip, etc.).

Children then need to go from saying the individual sounds of each letter, to being able to blend the sounds and say the whole word. This can be a big step for many children and takes time.

While children are learning to say the sounds of letters out loud, they will also begin to learn to write these letters (encoding). They will be taught where they need to start with each letter and how the letters need to be formed in relation to each other. Letters (or groups of letters) that represent phonemes are called graphemes.

Gradually children will focus on decoding (reading) three-letter words arranged consonant, vowel, consonant (CVC words) for some time. They will learn other letter sounds, such as the consonants g, b, d, h and the remaining vowels e, o, u. Often, they will be given letter cards to put together to make CVC words which they will be asked to say out loud.

Please click here  to learn more about how we teach phonics at our school.