Phonics and early reading 

We teach phonics and early reading skills using the Read, Write, Inc. approach. You may have heard this referred to as Synthetic Phonics.

Glossary of useful terms
Phonemes: the breaking down of words into their separate sound components 
Phonemes can consist of more than one letter for example ch, oo, er, igh etc. In our teaching we discuss elements such as:
Digraphs: these are two letters that make a single sound eg: ar, ee, ou etc.
Trigraphs are three letters that make a single sound eg: igh.
Grapheme: is a phoneme written down.
Segmenting: where you break each word into its separate phoneme, for example ‘chop’ has 3 phonemes, ch/o/p.
Blending: simply putting those sounds back together to form a word.

Some words in the English language cannot be broken down into separate phonemes. These are known as tricky words and we teach the children to be able to read and know the whole word, for example, ‘said’ or ‘what’.

​There are 3 sets of Speed Sounds which progress through the 44 phonic sounds. Once the children have Speed Sounds 1 they will start to use the Read, Write, Inc. reading and writing programme which incorporates: reading words, writing words and simple sentences. This goes from Red books to Grey books which the children should complete by Year 2. This is accompanied by Topic texts and story reading within the classroom.

These useful videos can help you to support your child as they learn with Read Write Inc. Phonics, with detailed ideas and advice on pronouncing pure sounds, blending, and digraphs.