This week, we will begin Phase 2 of the Letters and Sounds phonics programme.
In this phase, children will continue practising what they have learned from Phase 1, including ‘sound-talk’ (orally blending and segmenting words). They will also 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. Your child might use pictures or hand movements to help them remember these.
Children will learn 19 letters of the alphabet and one sound for each. They will blend sounds together to make words and segment words into their separate sounds. They will begin to read simple captions.
The 19 phonemes are:
- set 1: s a t p
- set 2: i n m d
- set 3: g o c k
- set 4: ck e u r
- set 5: h b f/ff l/ll ss
VC and CVC words
C and V are abbreviations for ‘consonant’ and ‘vowel’. VC words are words consisting of a vowel then a consonant (e.g. am, at, it) and CVC words are words consisting of a consonant then a vowel then a consonant (e.g. cat, rug, sun). Words such as ‘tick’ and ‘bell’ also count as CVC words – although they have four letters, they have only three sounds. For example, in the word bell, b = consonant, e = vowel, ll = consonant.
In Phase 2, children will be seeing letters and words, as well as hearing them. They will be shown how to make whole words by pushing magnetic or wooden letters together to form little words, reading little words on the interactive whiteboard and breaking up words into individual sounds, which will help their spelling. These will be simple words made up of two phonemes, for example, ‘am’, ‘at’, ‘it’, or three phonemes, for example, ‘cat’, ‘rug’, ‘sun’, ‘tick’, ‘bell’.
Tricky words
Your child will also learn several tricky words: ‘the’, ‘to’, ‘I’, ‘go’, ‘no’.
Children will still be practising oral blending and segmenting skills daily. They need plenty of practice at doing this.