What is Phonics?

The Ladybird Team on the Penguin Books Website state:

‘Phonics is the foundation stage of reading. It is teaching the letters and sounds needed for early reading.’

How we teach Phonics

In our Pre-School room we teach phonics using a simple repetitive pattern for example: ‘a is for apple, a, a, apple’. We have chosen words for each letter of the alphabet and we have this displayed in our room. On the display, we have the letter A in both capital and lower case, a picture representing a – apple, as well as the written repetitive pattern. We have this for each letter of the alphabet using familiar words such as ball, cat, dog, elephant etc. We use a repetitive clapping or tapping motion, using either our hands, musical instruments, or wooden sticks, to tap out the rhythm. Using these allow the children to recognise ‘long’ and ‘short’ sounds. For example, the ‘m’ grapheme has a long sound and ‘p’ has a short sound. These repetitive patterns teach children the graphemes, phonemes, initial sounds as well as give the foundation to learn how to sound out simple CVC (Consonant Vowel Consonant) words such as c-a-t and to learn to blend the sounds so c-a-t becomes cat.

What the children get from it

The children have lots of fun learning their phonics. Initially, it prepares children for lessons when they leave us and go to school. The transition to the structure of the day in school will be much easier when the children are used to lesson time and concentrating on activities.

As well as this, the way in which we do phonics teaches patience, resilience, listening skills as well as learning their letters and sounds.

Phonics is an amazing way to begin children’s reading and writing journeys. We try to instil a lifelong love of reading, which begins both at home and in an Early Years setting. We always have books readily available for the children to read. We have noticed children learning phonics have picked up on reading top to bottom and left to right as well as recognising familiar letters in the stories.

Phonics also helps with writing skills as when we do our Word of the Week for our display – children recognise the CVC words chosen. The more Phonics they learn, the easier they will be able to recognise the sounds, sound out the word and then blend the word.