Letters and Sounds Next 200 High Frequency Words words

Quite simply, high frequency words are words which occur most frequently in sentences.

Letters and Sounds First 100 High Frequency Words words

Quite simply, high frequency words are words which occur most frequently in sentences.

Spelling – work for EYFS

By the end of EYFS, students should be able to read and write words containing initial sound-spelling correspondences.  This includes CVC words, words with adjacent consonants, and some words with 2-syllables.

FREE Online Phonics Course for Parents

‘Help your child to read and write‘, written by Sounds-Write’s John Walker, is a FREE course, for parents and carers, which will introduce you to Units 1-7 of the Initial Code.

Subject knowledge – derivational and inflectional affixes

“Phonic knowledge should continue to underpin spelling after key stage 1; teachers should still draw pupils’ attention to GPCs that do and do not fit in with what has been taught so far. Increasingly, however, pupils also need to understand the role of morphology and etymology.”

Department for Education (2014) The National Curriculum. English Appendix 1: Spelling. [Online].

“I read that!” – the power of using decodable texts

I remember reading with my first Year 1 class at Angel Oak Academy.  There was a boy in my class who hadn’t understood the concepts, skills or knowledge that underpin early reading.  I think it’s fair to say he didn’t like reading.

How not to teach spelling

“Familiarity is not easily distinguished from truth.”

― Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow

 

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If you allow a child to spell ‘he’ as ‘hee’ or ‘they’ as ‘thay’, they’re going to practise misspelling these words.  They’ll become so familiar with their invented spellings that they may struggle to unlearn the inaccurate sound-spelling correspondences.  I use ‘invented spelling’ because the notion of ‘phonetically plausible’ spelling is flawed.

Phonetically IM-plausible

Shared Writing

Know your code. Know what they know. Know what is an exception*. If you know this, you’ll know when to ask the children for help and when to model.

I’m going to contextualise this blog post with Letters and Sounds Phase Two. I’ll explain how to systematically introduce the code in Phase Two Sets 1-5, then I’ll discuss how I’d lead a shared writing session in Reception. Spoiler: ‘phonetically plausible’ is implausible in the context of the more knowledgeable teacher modelling writing to students.

Ignorance is Bliss

If you’re reading this, you know your phonics; you’ve simply achieved ignorance in your expertise. Stay with me.

To ‘know your phonics’ is to have developed your skills in segmenting, blending and phoneme manipulation, and to know the code (the spellings of the 44 sounds that make up the English language)*. So, again, if you’re reading this you know your phonics. However, you may not necessarily know how to teach phonics (yet).

*(FYI: if you can speak, you know your sounds; if you can spell, you know the code.) 

Phonics – Systematic & Incidental

Systematic

There are approximately 175 spellings of the 44 sounds in the English Language.  A high-quality systematic synthetic phonics (SSP) programme will provide a sequence of sound-spelling correspondences; this sequence should be taught logically through a basic code in EYFS and a complex code in KS1.