Welcome to this week's phonics page!

READING PRACTISE!

Our first activity is a Powerpoint that has lots of Phase 4 words for you to read to your grown ups. You may need to sound them out and blend them to read them Or you may be able to read them as quick as a flash!

Grown ups- children can become quite dependent upon segmenting and blending to read, after all, it is what we teach them and encourage them to do in the early stages of learning to read! However, this slows reading down, makes reading sound a bit robotic and inhibits fluency developing. When the children aren't 'tied down' by the segmenting and blending process and they read the words quickly and 'on sight' they are able to tend to other important aspects of what they are reading, such as the grammar i.e. stopping and taking a short breath at full stops and using expression when speech marks appear and also their comprehension/understanding of what they are reading. When your child is reading the words in this slide show ask them if they can have a go at reading the whole word. It comes naturally and is a fundamental stage in learning to read but can require confidence in having a go and shaking off that reliance on segmenting and blending. Have your best try!  I've included a Phase 2/3 slideshow too which contains words that aren't as long as the Phase 4 ones. 

WRITING PRACTISE!

Once you have practised your reading, you can ask your grown ups to pick some words from these PowerPoints and you can have at go writing them.

Grown ups - The children will now be becoming quite proficient at writing short words with a few phonemes in them. They can hear a few sounds and recall and write them to spell the word. However, when words get a bit longer, as they do in phase 4, they have more phonemes to listen for and hear and more phonemes to recall and write. When you give your child a word to write tel them to s-t-r-e-t-c-h the word and listen for and write the letters for every  sound they can hear. Tell them to take their time and care. Allow them to check their work and spot where it went well and where they got it wrong and why. If your child is struggling to recall how to write the phonemes they can hear then give them a sound mat and ask them to look for it to help them to identify it.