Phonics
Thank you for attending the phonics mornings last week. We hope you found them useful.
We are continuing with phase 2 of our phonics programme, ‘Letters and Sounds’ and are learning ck, e, u and r. Children will be taught that two letters making one sound such as ck is called a digraph. Other digraphs include qu, th and sh.
In this phase children will be taught the phonemes (sounds) for a number of letters (graphemes), which phoneme is represented by which grapheme and that a phoneme can be represented by more than one letter, for example, /ll/ as in b-e-ll. We use Jolly Phonics actions to help children remember these phonemes. Each week the children will bring a set of letters home to learn. Please practise these every day and keep them in their book bag for us to add to.
Your child will be taught how to pronounce the phonemes correctly to make blending easier.
Sounds should be sustained where possible (e.g. sss, fff, mmm) and, where this is not possible, ‘uh’ sounds after consonants should be reduced as far as possible (e.g. try to avoid saying ‘buh’, ‘cuh’).
We will begin learning ‘tricky words’ next week which are words which are not phonetic. Please help your child to read these by recognition. The first tricky words are the and to which we will be sending home for the children to learn.
If you have any questions please do not hesitate to ask.