Phonics at Dorrington Academy
Phonics is recommended as the first strategy that children should be taught in helping them to read and spell words. At Dorrington Academy, we teach reading through Little Wandle, Letters and Sounds Revised, which is a systematic and synthetic phonics programme. We start teaching phonics in Reception and follow the Little Wandle Letters and Sounds Revised progression, ensuring that children build on their growing knowledge of the alphabetic code.
In daily phonics lessons, children are taught three main concepts;
- GPCs (Grapheme Phoneme Correspondences)
GPCs simply means that children are taught all the phonemes in the English Language and ways of writing them down. - Oral Blending
The children are taught to blend sounds by merging the individual sounds together until they can hear what the word is. This is a vital reading skill. - Oral Segmenting
Segmenting is the opposite of blending! The children are able to say a word first and then break it up to the phonemes that make it up and they can hear. This is a vital spelling skill.
Within phonics lessons, children are also taught to read and spell ‘tricky words’. These are words with unusual spellings that children cannot use their phonic knowledge to decode them at their current phonic phase. Children are taught to decode familiar parts of the word and identify the part that makes them tricky.
Children learn to apply their phonic skills and develop their fluency and comprehension skills in reading practice sessions that take place three times a week. A reading practice book is sent home from the start of Reception that is matched to each child’s current reading level.
Phonics at Home
There are many great websites and apps to support phonics learning at home. Here are some of our favourites which the children may already be familiar with from school;
- www.phonicsplay.co.uk (Buried treasure, Dragons Den, Picnic on Pluto)
- www.ictgames.co.uk (The Dinosaur’s Eggs, Poop Deck Pirates, Forest Phonics, Sound Buttons)
- http://www.familylearning.org.uk/phonics_games.html
- http://www.bbc.co.uk/bitesize/ks1/literacy/phonics/play/
Phonics Vocabulary Help
- Phoneme
The smallest unit of sound. Phonemes can be put together to make words. - Grapheme
A way of writing down a phoneme. Graphemes can be made up from 1 letter e.g. p, 2 letters e.g. ch, 3 letters e.g. igh or 4 letters e.g. tion. - GPC
Grapheme Phoneme Correspondence. The skill of being able to match the written representation to the sound that they hear. - Digraph
A grapheme containing two letters that make just one sound – th, sh, ch, ay, ee, ie, ou, ow - Split digraph
A vowel grapheme containing two letters but which allow a ‘bossy’ letter to stand between them. This does not stop the two letters still making their sound – a-e make, i-e bike, o-e bone, u-e tune - Trigraph
A grapheme containing three letters that make just one sound – igh, ear, ure, air, tch, are, ore - Blending
This involves looking at the written word, looking at each grapheme using their knowledge of GPCs in order to match to the phoneme and merge together to read the word. - Segmenting
This involves hearing a word and splitting it in to individual phonemes by sounding it out. Again using knowledge of GPCs will allow children to make written representations of each sound allowing them to spell the word.
