Phonics at Farnborough Grange
At Farnborough Grange Nursery and Infant School we follow the Read Write Inc scheme that was developed by Ruth Miskin. All of our teachers and support staff are trained to enable us to have smaller teaching groups and more personalised to the needs of individual children.
Read Write Inc teaches the phonic sounds in English, the letters that represent them and how to form the letters when writing them. Most children start their phonics journey with us in Nursery where we begin by learning to identify animal sounds and make sounds with our bodies. If the children are ready, they begin to learn the Set 1 sounds and the letters that represent them (see below) As the children progress into Reception, they continue to learn the Set 1 sounds and focus on reading and writing the letters that represent them. They begin to bring home books to help them learn to blend the sounds and read words that are not phonetically decodable, these are called Red Words. In Year 1, the children continue to recap the sounds learnt in Set 1 and move onto Set 2 which contains different sounds that require more than one letter to represent them e.g. 'ee' for tree.
At the end of Year 1 all of the children participate in the Phonics Screening Test that is undertaken Nationwide. This test assesses to see whether the children can regoonise all the phonic sounds they have learnt so far in real and not real words.
Terms and Meanings that we use in phonics
| Phonics | Phonics teaches children to listen to and identify the sounds that make up words. This helps them to read and write words. |
| Phoneme | A single sound that can be made by one or more letters – e.g. s, k, z, oo, ph, igh. |
Blending | Saying the individual sounds that make up a word and then merging or blending the sounds together to say the word – used when reading. e.g. c-a-t blended together says cat. |
| Segment | This is when a word is broken up into indevidual sounds for spelling e.g. cat is segmented into c-a-t. |
| Digraph | Two letters which together make one sound e.g. ch, sh, th, oa, ai, ay |
| Trigraph | Three letters that together make one sound e.g. igh |
Consonant | Most letters of the alphabet (excluding the vowels: a,e,i,o,u). |
Grapheme | The letters you write to create the sound e.g. ai/ ay/a for 'a'. |
Red Words | Words that are difficult to sound out e.g. said, the, because. |
| Green Words | Words that can be blended together and read e.g. ch- i- n |
| Fred Talk | Fred our phonics frog speaks in sounds only, e.g. ch-a-m-p |