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1 Phonics Progression in phonics: materials for whole-class teaching The National Literacy Strategy Department of Education and EmploymentSantuary BuildingsGreat Smith StreetLondon SW1P 3BT Crown copyright 1999 and 2000 Extracts from this document may be reproduced for non-commercial educational or training purposes on condition that the source 0 19 312246 4 ContentsPageIntroduction1 About this book9 Step 112 Steps 2 714 Phonic activities at each Step17 Instructions and bank of materials for activities18 Jingles18 Pebble Game18 Tray Game18 Match Me20 Circle Swap Shop20 Jump in the Hoop21 Mood Sounds21 letter Formation21

2 Phoneme Frame22 Which of Two (or more)?23 Quickwrite24 North, South, East and West (NSEW)24 Flashcards25 Sock Puppets25 Noisy Letters25 Croaker26 Alien Game27 Finish It27 Fans28 Full Circle Game29 Sound Buttons30 Cube Game30 Silly Questions31 Phoneme Count32 Washing Line33 Bingo33 Rhyming Word Generation and Word Sort34 Split Digraph36 Photocopy masters (PCMs)37 IntroductionIt is widely accepted that successful reading depends on learning to use a rangeof strategies. The reader uses these as cues to get to the meaning by predictingthe text, checking and cross-checking, identifying and correcting errors.

3 Reading isby no means a passive process; it involves searching, problem-solving, activeprediction and an ability to bring past knowledge and experience to bear. Thispicture is familiar enough. It is built into the National Curriculum orders forreading, and forms the background against which successful literacy teaching hasbeen developed over the past 10 can represent this as a set of searchlights, each shedding light on the text:The reading searchlights modelSuccessful teaching equips children with as many of these searchlights aspossible. Each sheds a partial light but, together, they make a mutuallysupporting system.

4 The fewer the searchlights the reader can switch on, the moredependent he/she is on a single one and if that one should fail, the reader will bestuck. The more searchlights we can teach children to switch on simultaneously,the less they will need to rely on a single one and the less it will matter if onefades or goes out. Thus, successful reading is often described in terms ofmaximising having as much information available from as manysearchlights for as much of the time as possible. As children learn to read, theyneed to be taught how to draw on all this knowledge and orchestrate it so thateach searchlight or cue is used to reinforce and check the others.

5 Most primary teachers understand the importance of teaching children to predictand check their reading by reference to the context and grammar of what they arereading. They need to check whether their reading makes sense and, if it does not,to re-check it, identify errors and try to correct them. These strategies are essentialto comprehension. They also provide necessary support for learning to decodewords to build them up from their spelling/sound patterns. The importance ofcomprehension has, rightly, been given much emphasis throughout the primaryyears. Comprehension must always be the primary purpose of reading.

6 As pupilsbecome more efficient decoders, the importance of context and grammarincrease, so that by the time they reach Years 5 and 6, almost all the teaching ofreading and writing should focus on the meaning and structure of texts. This general model of reading strategies is well known but it is notstraightforward for, depending on what is being read, some searchlights may bebrighter than others. Where texts are familiar and predictable, children can oftenrely heavily on contextual and grammatical knowledge, paying relatively littleattention to the sounds and spellings of words. They may make progress in the1 PROGRESSION IN PHONICS1.

7 Rationalephonic (sounds and spelling)word recognition and graphic knowledgegrammatical knowledgeknowledge of contextTEXT2 NATIONAL LITERACY STRATEGY early stages by reading and re-reading familiar texts. Because this story languageand its context are predictable, children can get by with very limited phonicstrategies and quickly become over-dependent on remembering or guessing theirway through the text. However, these young readers often meet problems later when faced withunfamiliar and more complex texts because they have learned to be over-dependent on contextual cues as the predominant strategy for reading.

8 As thefamiliarity of the text diminishes, they need to rely more on their ability to decodeindividual words. This is a difficulty that often manifests itself early in Key Stage 2in two ways. Firstly, too many pupils hit problems with more extended reading,and handling information and text-books needed to support work across thecurriculum. Secondly, they have significant spelling problems because they haveinadequate knowledge of the sound/spelling system. These problems, which needto be tackled in Key Stage 2, are often rooted in earlier work, where the need forsystematic teaching of phonics, spelling and vocabulary can easily be National Literacy Strategy stresses the importance of teaching children totackle texts from both ends, from the text down , so to speak, and from soundsand spellings up.

9 The balance is essential to get all the searchlights switched onfor pupils. It is reflected in the structure of the teaching objectives and in thestructure of the Literacy Hour, where the class teaching time is organised toprovide time both for working with shared texts and for the focused teaching ofphonics and arbitrariness of the spelling systemThe importance of systematic teaching of phonics and spelling needs to beunderlined, not least because it is often treated with suspicion. Young children donot learn to discriminate the sounds of words automatically. Still less do theyautomatically understand the common conventions for representing them inwriting.

10 This is a skill, tied to our particular way of writing our language, with 26letters to represent the 44 phonemes. Not all languages are represented in thisway. Japanese children, for example, do not need to break their spoken languagedown into phoneme/spelling patterns because it is not written alphabetically. Much of our contemporary spelling system was simply decided upon by DrJohnson when he regularised it in the first major dictionary. The way our languageis represented is thus arbitrary and, for most children, very hard to discover . Likelearning to form letters correctly or learning the correct fingering for the recorder,these things need to be taught.