Introduction to Phonics and Early Reading 2026-2027 1 Welcome! What is phonics? Blending Reading and books Reading at home Spelling Concerns about progress Questions and next steps Welcome parents to the session. We are very excited they are here to learn about the most amazing journey that their children are starting – learning to read!!! Explain how you are structuring the session/ sessions to give them information about how early reading is taught at your school and how they can play a vital role in supporting their child’s reading journey. 2 We love reading! Reading for pleasure Finding out information Reading the world around them Understanding forms and official documents Accessing learning Reading is one of the most important things we can teach our children.   We want all our children to be avid readers with a love for all different types of literature.  Think of reading activities you do everyday…. (ask parents to contribute or have a list to share!) As children start their school life they will very much focus on learning to read. As they move higher up the school and intro secondary education and beyond they will be reading to learn. So it is vitally important that we support our youngest pupils to quickly learn to read. We want every child to love reading and to do this we must make sure that it is a pleasurable experience and that they can read with accuracy and fluency so they can access as many opportunities as possible. 3 What is Phonics? Link between the words we say and the letters that represent each sound. Grapheme – the written letter or groups of letters Phoneme – the sounds that the grapheme makes. Over the past 50 years schools have taught children to read using lots of different approaches. But, thanks to research we know that phonics is the best way to teach children to read. We know this might be different to how you were taught to read so we hope this session/ sessions helps you to understand what phonics is, how we will teach phonics at our school and how you can help your child to learn to read. The national curriculum says that phonics should be the main way that schools teach children to read. The Department of education have recently approved phonics schemes that meet it’s criteria of a good scheme. Our school has chosen to use a scheme called Unlocking Letters and Sounds. All schemes are slightly differently but , as a school , we think this is the best one for our pupils. All children in the school will use Unlocking Letters and Sounds to teach their phonics and early reading. All staff have had training with this scheme so they are experts at using it. Phonics teaches the link between the words we read/ say and he words we write on the page. It teaches how the letters in written words represent the sounds we say in spoken words – this is called decoding. Sat the word CAT. When we say this word we say lots of sounds very quickly – so quickly we hardly notice the sound each letter makes. Say the sounds in CAT c/a/t What sounds can we hear? When we write the word cat we represent each sound with a symbol that we call a letter. C A T This is phonics! There is some technical vocabulary that we use for phonics and that your children will use. Grapheme – the written letter or groups of letters Phoneme – the sounds that the grapheme makes. With your new vocabulary can you tell me the phonemes that make this word (map) Can you tell me the graphemes that represent these phonemes? 4 What is Phonics? As children start to learn their grapheme phoneme correspondences (GPCs) it is very important that we pronounce the sounds clearly and purely. We also help them to learn and remember the GPCs in Reception with an image and action for each phoneme. Your children will be coming home sharing the actions with you so do join them when they are using them! Model pronunciation and actions for some of the first GPCs children will be learning. 5 Blending Pushing the phonemes together to make a word. t-r-ee As well as learning to recognise the graphemes and say the phonemes they represent we will be teaching children how to use these to read. When we read a word we look at each graphemes and match a sound to it. We push the sounds together to make a word. This is called BLENDING. Blending is a really important skills that children need lots of practice at – it will take lots of time! Let’s have a go at blending a word: t / r / ee We teach the children to work from left to right - identifying each grapheme and saying the phoneme. Once they have done that they go back and push the phonemes together to blend the phonemes together to read the word. We want to teach children to recognise the grapheme quickly so they can blend it rapidly. Once they can do this their reading will become fluent – and less painful! But this really does take a he amount of practise so it is really important that children practise this at home with the books we give them. As children progress in their reading journey they will begin to read longer words made up of multiple syllables – give the example of fun – funny – funniest We teach these words by ‘chunking’ them into syllables and blending these chunks together. But we are still identifying the GPCs and blending them together. This is what we will do as adults when we come across an unfamiliar word – use the example crepuscular. How would we read this unfamiliar word? We would chunk it and blend the syllables together. This is why it’s really important to teach children to read using phonics – without this skills to decode the graphemes we would not be able to read unfamiliar words. 6 Common Exception Words There are some words that we use a lot in English such as the, like, said, were. To give children’s reading a boost and so they can access more texts quickly we want children to learn these CEWs early on. Many of them have usual patterns or GPCs that aren’t taught until later on. So we teach children to recognise them by sight initially. Children will be able to decode some of them later on but , until they have learnt to decode them, we recognise them as CEWs. 7 Reading and Books Children will be given books when they can blend – this will be different for every child Books precisely match children’s phonics attainment Books will be kept for 1 week Books should be read 3 times decode build fluency comprehension (predict, ask questions, talk about the characters) As soon as your child can blend some GPCs together to read words we will be giving them a book. This is incredibly exciting but will be different for every child. Some learn this skills very quickly and others take a bit longer – we will be supporting every child to blend as quickly as possible. Please don’t compare your child with others and contact us if you are worried about anything. Once your child can read they will be given a book that precisely matches their phonics attainment so that they can read at least 95% of the words in it. Please don’t think that this makes the book too easy for them – it’s vitally important that reading is a celebration of children’s reading with you and a chance for them to show their phonics expertise. In school we will also be reading with children. They will read everyday in their phonics lessons and also every week/ day/ 3 times a week in a guided group. This is when they read with their teacher in a small group. The teacher will listen to every child read as well as teaching for part of the session. This allows us to check every child’s learning. We will listen to children read on a 1:1 basis once a fortnight/ term/ Books are allocated to match the sets and phases that children are secure in. When teachers assess they are ready to move onto the next set we wil do so but we know that this takes a different amount of time for each child – some will need more practice than others. 8 Reading at home 5 – 10 minutes Choose a time that works for you Be positive and celebrate successes Encourage them to point to the graphemes Encourage them to say the sounds and blend them together Be patient and let them try and work it out Read common exception words by sight. Reading at home is essential as it gives children the opportunity to practice their decoding and blending skills. We know everyone is busy and children often don’t want to read out of schools. Our top tips are: 5 – 10 minutes every day is often more effective than longer times Find a time that works for you. Reading at bed time sounds lovely but with a tired child it can often be tricky! Celebrate what your child can do and Encourage your child to point at the graphemes as they read – this helps them to track the words and know their place Encourage them t o say all the sounds in the words and then blend them together – you can show them how to do this. Be patient and give them time to work it out before stepping in before stepping in If they can’t read a word model how to do it and then ask them to do it. Let them read common exception words by sight. One of the most important ways to increase children’s accuracy, fluency and understanding of the book they are reading is to re-read the same books several times. This is why we only give XX number of books each week – we would like each book to be read at least three times with a different focus each time. This films explains the value of re- reading the same book and what you should focus on each time. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hhu3xeNq3Kg&t=200s 9 Reading at home   Magic finger Sound buttons Digraph e.g ck Trigraph e.g igh Whilst learning to decode and reading books that allow children to do this is important there is so much more to reading! We know that decodable books are not the most exciting to read and alone, won’t give our early readers all the skills they need to develop a love of reading. It is therefore important that you continue to read to your child and share a wide range of books with them – these should be books that children cannot decode themselves. Reading books to children is a precious and lovely thing to do – we are sure you and your child already have favourite books that you share together! By modelling reading and show how much you love reading you will be setting a fantastic example to your child. When you read to your child you will want to: Model how to read a book Ask questions about what has happened to support your child’s comprehension or understanding of the text Ask questions about characters’ feelings Discuss the meaning of words and vocabulary Ask children to predict what they think will happen next Make connections with things your child has experienced or other books or films they have seen Most importantly – show that you love reading! By modelling this you will support your child to develop their love of reading. 10 Reading at Home   Continue to read to your child. Model how to read a book – left to right, turning pages Ask questions about what has happened and characters’ feelings Support vocabulary Predict what will happen next Make connections Model your love of reading! Whilst learning to decode and reading books that allow children to do this is important there is so much more to reading! We know that decodable books are not the most exciting to read and alone, won’t give our early readers all the skills they need to develop a love of reading. It is therefore important that you continue to read to your child and share a wide range of books with them – these should be books that children cannot decode themselves. Reading books to children is a precious and lovely thing to do – we are sure you and your child already have favourite books that you share together! By modelling reading and show how much you love reading you will be setting a fantastic example to your child. When you read to your child you will want to: Model how to read a book Ask questions about what has happened to support your child’s comprehension or understanding of the text Ask questions about characters’ feelings Discuss the meaning of words and vocabulary Ask children to predict what they think will happen next Make connections with things your child has experienced or other books or films they have seen Most importantly – show that you love reading! By modelling this you will support your child to develop their love of reading. 11 Spelling and Handwriting Segmenting words Use your robot arms to help you sound out the word We are using Kinetic Letters to support our teaching of handwriting. Once children know how to form the letters they will be able to segment these into a written word using their phonics knowledge e.g. b-a-t We know that when children are reading they are decoding the GPCs they know and blending them together to read a word or group of words. We teach children to use their phonics to spell in the opposite way. Instead of blending the phonemes together to spell a words we seperate the phonemes so we can hear each sound to be able to spell the word. This is called segmenting. Let’s try segmenting this word to write it: sh i p Your child will write words, captions and sentences as part of their phonics lesson each day. As with reading, we will only ask them to write words contacting GPCs they have been taught. As part of their daily lesson we will also teach them how to write and form the letters they are writing. 12 Concerns about progress All children are different Discuss any concerns with teachers Teachers will assess your child regularly Interventions to support child in the specific skill they are struggling with Adaptations for children with SEND All children are different and, at different points in their learning, will find things more difficult or challenging. Staff at our school have all had training to identify what children are finding difficult and to help them overcome this. We know if is very tempting to compare your child to others – especially with reading and what books they are on etc but we would suggest you speak to teachers if you have any concerns. If we have any concerns we will discuss them with you – and we might ask you to do some extra practice at home. Teachers and TAs will assess your child reguarly to check their learning. We quickly identify any child who might be at risk of falling behind and will support them with extra phonics- usually by giving them ‘interventions’ to support the specific skill they are struggling with – some children may struggle to identify the GPC, others might not be able to blend yet. If a child has SEND we ma need to make adaptions to their phonics eg. additional time to practice, more visuals . Again we will discuss these with you but research has shown that phonics is the most effective way of teaching children with SEND to read. 13