Author: Lisa Clark

Phase 2

Phase 3
During Term 2/3, the children are taught another 26 graphemes. The final single-letter sounds are taught, together with more digraphs , (2 letters, 1 sound –ai) and trigraphs, (3 letters, 1 sound—igh). They also continue to learn to blend and segment CVC words using the new sounds, e.g. tail, sheet, night , (note that these words still only have three sounds). If they are ready , children will move to blending and segmenting two-syllable words such as cooker, eating, broken. They will continue to be taught tricky words by the Tricky Troll, nonsense words by Beegu and high frequency words .

How to help at home
Practice phonics every day.
Help your child to use phonics to read words.
Help your child to recognise the tricky words.
Encourage your child to select up to 3 sounds to make their own words, they don’t have to be real words!

Phonics in the
Early Years
Foundation Stage
Parent guide

Phonics in school
We follow the Twinkl Phonics Scheme and enrich it with the magic of the Phonics Fairy from Story Time Phonics. Lessons are taught in the morning for around 20 minutes, however phonics is interwoven into everything that we teach in the school day. The children are introduced to the ‘Phonics Fairy’ who weaves her magic and brings story books to life. The stories are linked to a sound and each day the children discover the special bag, along with a sprinkling of fairy dust, that has been left for them from their fairy friend.
The children take an active part in lessons, learning a caption action for the letter and a sparkle mark rhyme that helps them with letter formation. Following this, the children take part in activities that are linked to the new sound. For example, for the sound ‘d’ the children use spades to d,d dig for bones and jewels which have sounds or pictures of objects beginning with d. They use their robot arms to segment and blend words. Moving an arm for each sound and clapping the sounds together at the end.
Along the magical journey the children meet many memorable characters . Tricky Troll helps the children to read tricky words and Beegu , the alien, helps them to read words that are non words; nonsense words.
Terminology that you need to know.
Phoneme - Any one of the 44 sounds which make up words in the English language .
Grapheme – How a phoneme is written down. There can be more than one way to spell a phoneme. For example, the phoneme ‘ay’ is spelt differently in each of the words ‘way’, ‘make’, ‘fail’, ‘great’, ‘sleigh’ and ‘lady’.
Digraph– two letters that make one sound– ai .
Trigraph—3 letters that make one sound– igh.
Blending – Putting together the sounds in a word in order to read it, e.g. ‘f – r – o – g, frog’.
Segmenting – Breaking a word into its constituent sounds in order to spell them, e.g. ‘frog, f – r – o – g’’

Phase 1
Phase 1 phonics learning relies on children being able to hear and distinguish the sounds within words. The first phase focuses on key listening skills and recognising rhythm and rhyme in songs. This phase will have been taught in nursery but may need be recapped in the first few weeks of the year.
Phase 2
In Phase 2, children begin to learn letter sounds and match them to graphemes. Most of the first sounds are single-letter sounds but there are also several digraphs.
They learn a caption action for each sound. For example, when being introduced to the sound ‘ p’ they pretend to pop two bubbles and swing their arm, repeating ‘p, p, Pirate Pete!’ Remind your child not to add the ‘uh’ sound to any letter , instead of ‘puh’ we say p. In the lesson the children read the story of Pirate Pete and dress as pirates walking the plank whilst repeating the caption action. They will then use treasure maps to find gold coins with the sounds or words on. They will also practise the sparkle mark rhyme for ‘p’ - Walk Pirate Pete down the plank, back up and around the deck’. The activities linked to their phonics learning then form part of their continuous provision throughout the day.
Children will be introduced to 4 new sounds a week and will begin to blend the sounds to make words and segment the sounds to read words. By the end of Phase 2, children will be able to read some ‘vowel-consonant’ (vc) and ‘consonant-vowel-consonant’ (cvc) words, e.g. up, in, cat, pin. They will use their robot arms to help them. They also learn to read ‘Tricky Troll’ words which cannot be read phonetically for example, ’the’ , and high frequency words which are phonetically decodable e.g. at, in.