Phonics is a way of teaching children how to read and write. It helps children hear, identify and use different sounds that distinguish one word from another in the English language.
Written language can be compared to a code, so knowing the sounds of individual letters and how those letters sound when they’re combined will help children decode words as they read.
Understanding phonics will also help children know which letters to use when they are writing words.
Phonics involves matching the sounds of spoken English with individual letters or groups of letters. For example, the sound k can be spelled as c, k, ck or ch.
Teaching children to blend the sounds of letters together helps them decode unfamiliar or unknown words by sounding them out. For example, when a child is taught the sounds for the letters t, p, a and s, they can start to build up the words: “tap”, “taps”, “pat”, “pats” and “sat”.
Step 1 – Letter Sounds
Most phonics programmes start by teaching children to see a letter and then say the sound it represents. Children are often taught the letters S,A,T,P,I,N first, so that they can sound out a wide variety of words (e.g. sat, pin, pat).
Children should also begin to learn how to write these letters using the correct formation.
Step 2 – Blending
Children are taught how to blend individual sounds together to say a whole word. They will start with CVC (consonant, vowel, consonant) words such as sit, pan, tap, before moving on to CCVC words (e.g. stop, plan) and CVCC words (e.g. milk, past).
Step 3 – Digraphs
Once the children have learnt individual letter sounds, they will start learning to read and write digraphs. They will learn consonant digraphs (e.g. ch, sh, ng) and vowel digraphs (e.g. ea, oo, ai). Then they will move on to sounding out whole words such as hair, moon, chin etc.
Alongside this, children should be introduced to ‘tricky words’ (also called common exception words). These are common words that don’t follow the normal phonics rules (e.g he, she, was, they, all).
Step 4 – Alternative graphemes
Once children are confident with the above, they will start learning more graphemes. They will learn that one sound can be represented by different graphemes. For example, the ‘ai’ sound (rain) can be represented as ‘ay’ (day), ‘a_e’ (make), ‘eigh’ (eight) and ‘a’ (apron). Alternative pronunciations for graphemes will also be introduced, e.g. ‘ea’ in sea, head and break.
Step 5 – Fluency and Accuracy
By this point, children should be able to read many familiar words automatically and sound out unfamiliar words. They should be able to spell words phonetically but not necessarily correctly.
NICE
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