At BMH, we aim to consistently enhance our communication and share with our community members the excellent teaching, learning and development taking place at the school. Coffee Mornings/ Afternoons are held fortnightly to share information on the design of the school's curriculum and to enhance communication and collaboration between home and school to better support student development.
During our last Coffee Afternoon, the English team shared with parents about Phonics and parents experienced the different learning stages of the Phonics curriculum. Here is an overview of what the English team shared about Phonics so that you can help your children to learn at home.
Phonics serves as the building blocks to acquiring strong English reading, writing and pronunciation skills. At BMH, we follow the Twinkl Phonics programme (a UK Department for Education-approved Phonics programme) from pre-K to Senior 7. The Twinkl Phonics programme is a fully comprehensive, synthetic Phonics teaching programme that progresses through six levels. Children at BMH have weekly Phonics lessons and are rigorously assessed several times a year so we can track progress and identify key areas for learning.
How can you help your child at home?
Here are some guidelines and tips to Phonics learning which accompany the article video.
Good Phonics retention relies on consistency and repetition, using the skills of rapid recall (GPC), blending and segmenting. It helps if children are able to practise these skills at home as well as in the classroom. Please read on and watch the video for more information…
Materials and resources to use at home
A mini whiteboard and whiteboard pens
A long ruler or pointer
Levelled sound mats (available from the BMH English Department)
Grapheme flashcards (available from the BMH English Department)
There are four key elements that children need to master in order to read and write fluently:
1) rapid recall of GPCs (Grapheme-Phoneme Correspondences (the relationship between sounds and the letter or letters that represent the sound);
2) rapid recall of tricky/common exception words;
3) efficient blending skills;
4) efficient segmenting skills;
The four skills represent the cornerstones of phonics and must be practised consistently to ensure children make the expected progress.
Blending is the key skill in the development of word reading. It is the process of saying each individual phoneme that appears in a written word and then running the phonemes together to hear and say the word. For the process of blending to be as smooth and effective as possible, pure sounds must be used.
Segmenting is the key skill in the development of word writing. It is the process of breaking down a word into the individual phonemes in order to correctly spell the word. Children listen to, and identify, the phonemes in a word and then choose the correct grapheme or graphemes to represent them.Encourage children to hold up their fingers as they hear each phoneme.
Phoneme - A phoneme is the smallest unit of sound in a word. It is generally accepted that most varieties of spoken English use about 44 phonemes (e.g. ‘dog’ consists of three phonemes: d-o-g).
Grapheme - A grapheme is a letter or group of letters representing a sound (e.g. /c/, /sh/, /igh/, /tch/).
Blending – Hearing or reading a series of spoken sounds (phonemes) and merging the individual phonemes together to read a word.
Segmenting - Consists of breaking words down into phonemes to spell.
Digraph - This is when two letters join together to make a phoneme. For example, /oa/ makes the sound in ‘boat’ and is also known as a vowel digraph. There are also consonant digraphs, for example, /sh/ in ‘ship’ and /ch/ in ‘chick’.
Trigraph - This is when three letters join together to make one phoneme, for example, /igh/ in ‘night’.
Split Digraph - A digraph in which the two letters are not adjacent (e.g. make, bone).
Useful Websites
•//www.phonicsplay.co.uk/
•https://www.readwithphonics.com/
•//www.letters-and-sounds.com/
•//www.familylearning.org.uk/phonics_games.html
•//www.ictgames.co.uk/
•https://www.kizpgonics.com/materials/phonics-games/
•https://www.topmarks.co.uk/english-games/5-7-years/letters-and-sounds
•https://www.teachyourmonster.org
