Phonics is a way of teaching children to read and write. It helps them to hear and identify individual sounds in words (phonemes) and recognise the letter or group of letters that make that sound (graphemes). Through daily phonic intervention sessions, children are taught to recognise the correspondence between phonemes and graphemes, enabling them to decode unfamiliar words.
Each session begins with flashcards of graphemes. Children call out the sounds that are written on the cards. Each week a new sound is introduced and work is focussed on learning to read and write it with confidence. We have a great many resources to hand and aim to keep the sessions active and fun.
Besides learning a new sound each week, children are taught “tricky words”. These are everyday words that have difficult phoneme/grapheme correspondences and are difficult to decode. As children progress through these daily sessions their vocabulary increases and reading and writing improves.