Phonics

What is Phonics?

2 Corinthians 1:13 of the Bible

“For we write nothing else to you than what you read and understand, and I hope you will understand until the end.”

Phonics is a way of teaching children how to read and write. It helps children hear, identify and use different sounds that distinguish one word from another in the English language. Written language can be compared to a code, so knowing the sounds of individual letters and how those letters sound when they’re combined will help children decode words as they read. Understanding phonics will also help children know which letters to use when they are writing words. Phonics involves matching the sounds of spoken English with individual letters or groups of letters. For example, the sound k can be spelled as c, k, ck or ch. Teaching children to blend the sounds of letters together helps them decode unfamiliar or unknown words by sounding them out. For example, when a child is taught the sounds for the letters t, p, a and s, they can start to build up the words: “tap”, “taps”, “pat”, “pats” and “sat”.

Here at Egerton, we deliver our phonics lessons using Read Write Inc. Read Write Inc. is a popular phonics scheme. Like all phonics schemes, it teaches children the sounds in English, the letters that represent them, and how to form the letters when writing. Read Write Inc. Phonics includes reading books written using only the letters they have learnt at each level (and a small number of separately taught tricky words). Tricky words are words where the spelling of the word does not appear to fit with the phonemes that children have been taught so far. These words are taught as whole words rather than as a combination of sounds. Using the Read Write Inc. scheme, children quickly feel confident and successful readers.