Reading

Phonics

The children have been incredibly enthusiastic about learning their letter sounds. Every child can now do the ‘Phonic rap’! Over the past few weeks, the children have moved onto the next stage of their reading journey; blending! Blending is one of the skills children need to develop when learning to read with phonics. They need to be able to look at the letters in a word, say the sounds and hear the word.

Blending needs practice – some children grasp the skill straight away and others can take much longer. The two main reasons why children struggle to hear the word when they have said the sounds are that they don’t know the letter sounds well enough (so they pause to think between letters) or the letter sounds are not being pronounced correctly.

Here is a website that gives you each sound audibly when you click on the letters, so you can check your child has the right pronunciation.

Over the next few weeks I would like to introduce the children to a few ‘Tricky’ words. Although the children have been learning to blend letter sounds in words for e.g. ‘c – a – t’ to read ‘cat’. They need to remember ‘Tricky’ words because they are words that cannot be read by blending the sounds e.g. ‘the’. Each week we will focus on four ‘Tricky’ words.

Week 1     24th – 30th October                the / to / I  /no

Week 2     7th -13th November                go / he / she / we

Week 3     14th – 20th November           me / be / was / my

Week 4     21st – 27th November            you / her / they / all

Week 5    28th November –4thDecember   are