Phonics

Phonics is the study of the relationship between letters and sounds. It's how we teach children from

Nursery to Year 2 how to read and spell. Remember flashcards with word's like 'exciting' on them, and

you just had to say that word? Yeah that's out, so's the magic e (more on that later though).

It's important to remember that there's the alphabet, and then there's the sound the letter makes.

There are 26 letters, but 44 sounds, and these can change with accents and dialects.

As an example, think of F. Make the 'fff' sound. You don't say 'eff'. This is because F can be spelt in the following ways:

f, ff, ph, gh, lf, ft

fat, cliff, phone, enough, half, often

(this came from https://www.dyslexia-reading-well.com/44-phonemes-in-english.html)

In New Zealand, the pakeha accent makes 'i' sound like 'e' to untrained ears. I had a confusing 10 minutes once with a child who, I thought, was telling me the story of the three little pegs, until they were even more confused when I said, 'Oh, PIGS! You're saying pigs!' really rather too loudly.

When showing how a word sounds, it’s important to make the sounds and not the ‘letter names’. So S

would not be ‘ess’, but the hiss you make when you say the sound. Also, try not to schwarm the sound.

The sound 'g' shouldn't sound like 'guh', but the actual sound 'g' makes at the back of your throat, to the

top of your mouth.

As an example, ‘make’ would sound like mmmm [inside the mouth], ay [a long sound], k [short sound at the back of the throat].

It would not sound like muh, ah, kuh, eh because the e is silent.

Which brings me onto definitions of sounds and why that e is silent! In the UK, children are expected to

know these by the end of Year 2, but New Zealand education is a bit more… um, sensible?

However, I also find it helpful to pop the bonnet and see what’s going on.

Phoneme: 

a single verbal sound, which can be made using more than one letter. 

For example, s, k, z, oo [as is moon] and ph [as in dolphin]

Grapheme:

a single written sound, which can be made using more than one letter. While phonemes

are spoken, graphemes are written.

For example, l, sh, air, ck 

The following are subsections of phonemes and graphemes

Diagraph:

a sound using two letters.

For example, reading, coat, feet, crayon 

Trigraph:

a sound using three letters

For example, night, watch, beard, hair

Split diagraph:

A single sound made of two letters which are seperated in the word. These are 99% of

the time a vowel and an e, which is where you get ‘silent/magic e’ from. A split diagraph is always a
longer vowel sound.

For example, bone, cube, mice, cake, swede

Phonetically Plausible Spelling

What we look for at this stage in their writing is phonetically plausible spelling. We want children to avoid

writing letters at random for words, as that shows they don’t know the relationship between letters and

sounds. If your child does this, it’s helpful for them to orally tell you their story, you write it down and read

it aloud to them again. Then they can trace over your writing and write the story underneath your writing,

saying the sounds out loud as they write. 

Long vowel sounds are tricky to write, because there can be up to a dozen different ways of spelling the

same sound! 

For example, phonetically plausible spellings of the word ‘make’ could be:

Mak mayke mayke maik maike Maighk

Meighk meyk meyke mace mac Macke mack

However, nake would not be phonetically plausible, as n and m make two separate and distinct sounds.

As long as the sound is right, your child is doing okay!

Segmenting and Blending

This is how we 'break up' the words to hear the sounds. When a difficult word presents itself in reading, ask your child to say the individual sounds, like

c - a - t

and then say the whole word together,

cat.

Bare in mind this is a skill that needs to be learned and if your child stares dolefully at the swirling text, unable to make head nor tail of the word, you can do it for them. If it happens a lot, chances are the book is too hard for them to read by themselves and they need something simpler. Reading should be fun after all, not some hideous slog of an uphill struggle.

Phases

Phonics is split into 6 phases (in the UK, anyway). Each phase has it's own focus and difficulty, and is linked to your child's year group. I'd really recommend https://new.phonicsplay.co.uk/, a brilliant website which has all it's phonics based on the official UK phonics plan Letters and Sounds. It's also free to use now, which is nice, because the printables are lovely!

The phases usually fall into these year groups:

Phase 1: nursery/reception

Phase 2: Year 1 (the first 6 weeks or there abouts)

Phase 3- 5: Year 1

Phase 6: Year 2, but you might find your Year 2 child is covering Phase 5 again.

A more in depth look at the phases and what they mean can be found here: https://www.theschoolrun.com/what-are-phonics-phases

High Frequency Words

These are words which are used all the time and, due to the fact they are so common, we expect children

to be building their vocabulary and word bank so these word’s spelling are second nature to them. We

haven't entirely thrown out the flash cards yet! A list of high frequency words (or HFW, because education

types do love a good initialism) can be found for free here: http://www.highfrequencywords.org/. You probably have a list of spellings from your teacher, but this also a good resource to have.

Tricky Words

These, like high frequency words, are used all the time, but they don't play by phonics rules, maaaan. Words like 'was', 'the', 'are' can't be sounded out and, unfortunately, just need to be learned. https://www.twinkl.co.nz/ is another awesome website, also free right now, where you can get word mats and printable games, as well as everything else you could possibly need to keep up phonics at home. High frequency and tricky words are linked to phases as well.

Personally, I love phonics. I like how it gives the children the building blocks for language and helps build independent writing and reading. Ideally, children should be reading and writing every day to keep their phonics knowledge up to scratch, but if it doesn't happen, it doesn't happen.

Hope this was helpful!

Elspeth