Phonics and Spelling

Phonics

Subject Lead: Mrs S Perry

Our approach to teaching reading is based on the emphasis of developing early reading skills through phonics. Sounds Write is the resource we use at Lingey House to support the systematic teaching of phonics. Children begin the Sounds Write programme with informal teaching in Nursery and are taught daily through to Key Stage One. Usually children will have secured their knowledge of phonics by the time they reach Year 2 where they will begin to explore spelling patterns.

If you would like to know which sound pattern your child is working on, please speak to your child’s class teacher.

Phonics Glossary

blending	Blending is the skill of joining sounds together to read words. Children are taught to say the separate sounds in a word and to then blend them together to decode the word.
digraph	A digraph is a sound that is represented by two letters e.g. the sound 'a' in rain is represented by the digraph 'ai'.
grapheme	A grapheme is a visual representation of a sound e.g. a letter or a group of letters. Some sounds are represented by a single letter whilst others are represented by more than one letter.
phoneme	A phoneme is a unit of sound e.g. the word 'cat' contains three phonemes; c - a - t.
segmenting	Segmenting is the opposite of blending. Children are taught to segment a word into its separate sounds in order to spell it.
split digraph	A split digraph is a digraph that is separated by other letters e.g. the sound 'a' in the word take is represented by the split digraph a-e.