At Monteagle Primary School we teach phonics using the accredited systematic synthetic programme Little Wandle Letters and Sounds Revised. The principles and practice are used to teach high quality phonics across Early Years Foundation Stage and Key Stage 1.
Children in Reception and Year 1 are taught a discrete phonics session daily for approximately 20-30 minutes as a whole class. Phonics skills are practiced and embedded in reading and writing through different activities throughout the day. Alongside this the children will receive reading practise sessions and individual reading opportunities.
How to help your child at home
To help your child at home, there are some video attached to show you how we pronounce each of the phonemes and how we blend. When you talk about letters to your child, remember to use the letter sounds rather than the alphabet names of the letters just like the children have been taught in school. The reason for this is that sounding out words is practically impossible if you use the alphabet names.
Phonic terms
As we teach the children to learn to read, we will use the correct terminology. You may here your child say some of these:
Phonemes: The smallest units of sound that are found within a word
Grapheme: The spelling of the sound e.g. th
Diagraph: Two letters that make one phoneme when read
Trigraphs: Three letters that make one phoneme
CVC: Stands for consonant, vowel, consonant
Segmenting is breaking up a word into its phonemes
Blending : Putting the phonemes together to read a word
Tricky words: Words that cannot easily be decoded
Pseudo/Alien Words: Words that are not real
Over the coming weeks, we will posting more videos and links to help you support your child at home. Keep an eye out for them.
