Welcome to our Phonics Learning Page

For phonics here at Leesland, we follow a programme called Read Write Inc. Phonics.

It was first created by Ruth Miskin in 2002. It is the UK’s leading synthetic phonics programme. 

Read Write Inc. Phonics is for children from Reception to Year 4, and children with SEND in older year groups.

With Read Write Inc. Phonics children:

• reach the expected standard of the phonics screening check
• develop reading fluency and read with comprehension
• develop co-operative behaviour and articulate their ideas and understanding
• spell and write with confidence.

Watch this video which explains what Read Write Inc is all about... 

Home Learning

Below are videos for families to practise their child's sounds at home. They are sorted into three sets. Please ask your child's teacher if your are not sure which sounds your child is working on. 

Further support to help at home with phonics..

Jargon Buster!

We know that sometimes the way things are named or described can make them sound trickier than they are. Here is our jargon buster to help you get a clearer picture of what we talking about in phonics...

• Pure Sounds – pronouncing the sounds of letters and combinations of letters correctly, for example not saying ‘muh’ but ‘mmmmm’. Avoid trying to say an ‘uh’ at the end of the sound. 

• Oral blending – hearing a series of sounds and merging them together to say the word, for example an adult says ‘b-u-s’ and the child says ‘bus’.

• Blending – children see a word, say those individual sounds in the word and then merges those sounds together to hear the whole words like c-a-t makes ‘cat’. This is vital for reading.

• Segmenting – the opposite to blending. Children break up the word into its component sounds. This is vital for spelling and writing words. This is called 'Fred talk' in RWI because this is how our friendly frog Fred, talks to the children. To support the children further, they use their 'Fred fingers' to press each sound on to. This helps them when spelling a word. 

• Phoneme – The smallest unit of sound. There are approximately 44 in the English language to learn.

• Grapheme – the written form of a phoneme. They can be made up of different numbers of letters for example 1 letter – s, 2 letters – ai, 3 letters – igh.

• Digraph – two letters that make one phoneme, for example oo, oa, ee

• Trigraph – three letters that make one phoneme, for example ear, igh, air

• Split digraph – perhaps you know this as the’magic e’? It is when a digraph (ie) has been split and a consonant has been placed in the middle. The ‘ie’ is still making the sound despite a letter in the middle. There are five split digraphs to learn:

i_e like in time
a_e like in cake
o_e like in joke
e_e like in theme
u_e like in tube

• Decoding/decodable – being able to ‘sound out’ the word into its componant phonemes.

• Polysyllabic – a word that is made up of more that one syllable.

• Tricky words – there are words that cannot be decoded and sounded out. These words just need to be learnt by sight. Sometimes a tricky word taught within a phase can become a decodable word once your child moves up the phases, for example ‘out’ and ‘like’. These are also referred to as Common Exception Words, simply meaning that they do not follow the rules.

• Nonsense words/Alien Words – Words that can be decoded but are made up and do not make sense. These words really test phonics skills. If a child has good phonic knowledge they will be able to decode both real and 'alien' words.

• Sound buttons – a button drawn or placed under each individual grapheme. Every time the button is pressed your child makes the sound and then blends all the sounds together to read the words. The word ‘cat’ would have three dot sounds buttons and ‘moon’ would also have three but the ‘oo’ would have a longer line button underneath.

• CVC – Consonant, vowel, consonant. These can be simple three letter words like ‘mat’ but also the word ‘rain’ is a CVC word as the ‘ai’ is a vowel digraph in the middle. This is the same for words like moon, chain, sheet. The ‘ch’ and ‘sh’ are a consonant digraph and one sound. The word ‘boy’, for example, even though has 3 letters is not a CVC word as it only has two phonemes b-oy. This is the same for words like cow, tie, say.

• Alliteration – words that begin with the same phoneme (snake, sock, scissors, star)

• Letter formation – the way each individual letter is formed. Children will need to learn where they need to start for each letter.