Phonics
Students learn to read and spell when they are systematically, explicitly and cumulatively taught phonic knowledge. In other words, understand the relationship between the 44 sounds, 26 letters and 250 letter-sound combinations of the English language (Nayton, 2021).
At Hyden Primary School, the systematic teaching of synthetics phonics occurs every day, from Kindergarten to Year 2, using the six phase Letters and Sounds program.
Glossary
- Phoneme – the smallest units of speech sounds. There are 44 speech sounds in the English language.
- Grapheme – a letter or sequence of letters that represent speech sounds.
- Vowel – a speech sound represented by the letters a, e, i, o, u. Can be short (a as in cat) or long (a as in ape). Air is not blocked by the lips, tongue or throat before leaving the mouth.
- Consonant – a speech sound represented by the letters that are not vowels. Air is blocked by the lips, tongue or throat before leaving the mouth.
- Diagraph – pairs of consonants or vowels that make a single speech sound e.g. sh, ai, wh, oo.
- Split vowel diagraph – a diagraph separated by a consonant.
- Blending – blending letters together to identify a word when reading.
- Segmenting – breaking a word apart into its individual sounds (phonemes) which assists during spelling.
- Syllable – a unit of speech with one vowel sound, with or without surrounding consonants that make up a whole or part of a word.
- Decoding – applying knowledge of letter-sound relationships to read. Sometimes referred to as ‘sounding out’.
