Please find some useful information on how to support your child with Phonics and Reading at home including some comprehension questions and sentence stems which will support you in knowing what to ask your child while reading. There are also suggested questions and activities in the front and back cover of the rocket phonics books that you may wish to do in order to help develop your child's comprehension skills. .

We hope this information will help you to support your child in further developing these important skills. 

Please do not hesitate to contact Mrs. Rogers, Mrs Scarfe or Mrs Flory (English Leaders) or your class teacher if you would like any further support

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.

Phonics Screening Information

In Year 1 most children will have taken the phonics screening check in June. They needed to read 40 words which were a mixture of real and nonsense words for them to apply their phonics knowledge to read the words. For those children who did not undertake the check or achieve a minimum of 32 marks, they will take the screening check in June. Throughout the year, the children will continue to build on their phonics knowledge from their starting point and will continue to practise segmenting and blending words in a variety of contexts. 

If you have any questions regarding the phonics screening check, please speak to your child's class teacher.