It’s brilliant to see that everyone is having great fun learning at home. One of my favourite lessons to teach is phonics, so I thought I’d share my top tips with you!

A daily phonics session should ideally last around 20-30 minutes, but don’t worry if you can only manage 5-10 minutes – every little helps.
Each phonics session has 4 parts to it: Revisit/ Review, Teach, Practise and Apply.
In Reception, the children are fantastic at taking on the role of the teacher and they always keep my right when I make little mistakes!
The Phonics Play website is currently offering free access to all of its games using the username: march20 and the password: home

We always start our phonics session with the Revisit/ Review section:
Our favourite games to do this are: Speed Trial, Time Challenge and Tricky Word Trucks.
Focus on Phase 2 and Phase 3 and listen closely to see which sounds your child does not recognise.

Teach:
Then we choose our sound of the day. We always focus on one new sound or a new tricky word. The order of sounds can be found here: Phase 2 and Phase 3.
If we were focusing on the digraph (two letters which make one sound) ‘sh’, I would say the words: shark, shop, ship and encourage the children to find the sound that is in each of those words.We would practise saying ‘sh’ together in lots of ways either shouting or whispering etc. and we could use Geraldine Giraffe to think of more ‘sh’ words. We would finally practise writing ‘sh’ in the air or on a piece of paper.

Practise:
To practise our recognition of our sound of the day, ‘sh’, we could then play one of our favourite word reading games such as: Dragon’s Den, Picnic on Pluto or Buried Treasure. In these games, the children have to decide whether they have read a real word or a nonsense word.

Apply:
Finally, in the apply section we would aim to apply the new sound that we have introduced by reading and writing it in words or sentences. You could give your child a sentence with the sound of the day in it to read, such as: ‘The shark went to the shop on the ship’. They could then practise reading and writing the ‘sh’ words, or for an additional challenge they could write the full sentence. You could also try these games: Sentence Substitution or Silly Sentences.

Then, when we started our phonics learning tomorrow we could review and revisit all of the sounds that we have looked at so far, including our sound from yesterday ‘sh’. Then the next sound we looked at would be ‘ch’ and we would follow the same sequence of learning as yesterday for our new sound of the day.

I know that phonics can be a daunting area of learning to support your child with, but the most important part is that they have fun whilst they are learning! If all else fails, encourage them to be the teacher and let them practise reading and writing any of the phase 2 and phase 3 sounds and tricky words.

If you have any questions or would like any additional information, please leave a comment below.
I have also added links to useful phonics resources and websites here.

Thank you!
Miss Edwards 🙂