Subject Lead - Miss Dobinson

By ensuring high-quality phonics teaching the government wants to improve literacy levels to:

• give all children a solid base upon which to build as they progress through school
• help children to develop the habit of reading widely and often, for both pleasure and information

In April 2021, the DFE published the revised core criteria for effective systematic synthetic phonics teaching programmes and launched a new process to validate complete systematic synthetic phonics teaching programmes.

Nursery - Year 2 children follow the 'Twinkl' phonics scheme on a daily basis.

Phonics Glossary:

Blend - Saying the individual sounds that make up a word and then merging or blending the sounds together to say the word – used when reading.

Consonant - Most letters of the alphabet (excluding the vowels: a,e,i,o,u).

CVC Words - Abbreviation used for consonant-vowel-consonant words, used to describe the order of sounds. Some examples of CVC words are: cat, pen, top, chat (because ch makes one sound). Other similar abbreviations include: • VC words e.g. on, is, it. • CCVC words e.g. trap and black. • CVCC words e.g. milk and fast.

Digraph - Two letters which together make one sound e.g. ee, oa, ea, ch, ay. There are different types of digraph: • Vowel digraph: a digraph in which at least one of the letters is a vowel, for example; b(oa)t or d(ay). • Consonant digraph: two consonants which can go together, for example (sh)op or (th)in. • Split digraph (previously called magic e): two letters, which work as a pair to make one sound, but are separated within the word e.g. a-e, e-e, i-e, o-e, u-e. For example c(a)k(e) or p(i)n(e).

Grapheme - Written letters or a group of letters which represent one single sound (phoneme) e.g. a, l, sh, air, ck.

Phoneme - A single sound that can be made by one or more letters – e.g. s, k, z, oo, ph, igh.

Phonics - Phonics teaches children to listen to and identify the sounds that make up words. This helps them to read and write words.

Pure Sound - Pronouncing each letter sound clearly and distinctly without adding additional sounds to the end e.g. ‘f’ not ‘fuh.’

Segment - This is the opposite of blending (see above). Splitting a word up into individual sounds – used when spelling and writing.

Tricky Words - Words that are difficult to sound out e.g. said, the, because.

Trigraph - Three letters which go together make one sound e.g. ear, air, igh, dge, tch.

Vowel - The letters a, e, i, o, u.