At St Nicholas CE Primary School, we believe that it is essential that all children become confident, successful, fluent readers and spellers. To do so, we aim for all children to develop competence in word reading; promote and develop language comprehension; and ensure that throughout their time at St Nicholas CE Primary they experience a range of high-quality texts leading to a strong reading culture. We believe in the importance of teaching children systematic synthetic phonics as a firm foundation for reading. Being able to read most words ‘at a glance’, supports children in being free to focus on the meaning of what has been read.

Our Phonics Workshop was a great success! A huge thank you to all of those families that were able to take part. Our workshop consisted of information about Phonics taught at St Nicholas Primary School, information about the statutory Phonics Screen in June and then the Year 1 children joined us for some Phonics fun and games!

Technical Vocabulary Explained:

• Phoneme: the smallest unit of sound. There are 44 phonemes in English. Phonemes can be put together to make words.
• Grapheme: way of writing down a phoneme. Graphemes can be made up from 1 letter e.g. p, 2 letters e.g. sh, 3 letters e.g. tch or 4 letters e.g ough
• Digraph: a grapheme containing two letters that makes just one sound (phoneme). 
• Trigraph: a grapheme containing three letters that makes just one sound (phoneme).
• GPC: grapheme-phoneme correspondence
• Blending: Looking at a written word, looking at each grapheme and using knowledge of GPCs to work out which phoneme each grapheme represents and then merging these phonemes together to make a word. This is the basis of reading.
• Oral Segmenting: Hearing a whole word and then splitting it up into the phonemes that make it. Children need to develop this skill before they will be able to segment words to spell them.
• Segmenting: Hearing a word, splitting it up into the phonemes that make it, using knowledge of GPCs to work out which graphemes represent those phonemes and then writing those graphemes down in the right order. This is the basis of spelling.