Reading and Phonics At Radwinter
* NEW* Reading for Pleasure Resources for Parents
Click on the link to see a Padlet filled with resources and website to help support reading for pleasure at home and at school.
We use Little Wandle Revised Letters and Sounds for our phonics programme. We have matched our books to each Phonics Phase going from Phase 2 to Phase 5. After Phase 5, children will move onto our KS2 reading books. Please see the letter below for more information.
Little Wandle Phonics Resources to Support Parents
New to Phonics? Wondering what how to say each phoneme? Click on the videos links for support and guidance.
Click on the link below to find out more about how we teach Phonics
Parents’ guide to phonics: a glossary of key terms
Phonics help children learn to read by teaching them to say the sounds that letters or groups of letters represent. It sounds simple, but it can be incredibly daunting when you are faced with technical vocabulary like split digraphs, phonemes or graphemes! Below, we breakdown key terms into a handy glossary to help you aid your child at home.
Blending
Blending involves merging the sounds in a word together in order to pronounce it. This is important for reading. For example, j-a-m blended together reads the word jam.
Consonant
The letters of the alphabet (apart from the vowels a, e, i, o and u).
CVC words
An abbreviation for consonant-vowel-consonant. This is a simple way of indicating the order of the graphemes in words. For example, it (VC), cat (CVC), bench (CVCC).
Digraph
A grapheme made up of two letters that makes one sound (sh in fish).
Grapheme
A grapheme is simply a way of writing down a phoneme. A grapheme can be one letter (s), two letters (ir), three letters (igh) or four letters in length (ough).
Grapheme-phoneme correspondences (GPCs)
Knowing your GPCs means being able to hear a phoneme and knowing what grapheme to use to represent it. This is helpful for spelling.
Conversely, it also means seeing a grapheme and knowing the phoneme that relates to it, which is important for reading.
Phoneme
The smallest unit of sound in a word. There are around 44 phonemes in English and they are represented by graphemes in writing. Phonemes are usually shown as symbols between two forward slashes. For example, /b/ or /ch/.
Segmenting
Segmenting involves breaking up a word that you hear into its sounds. This helps with spelling because if you know what graphemes represent the sounds in the word, you can write it!
For example, the word jam is segmented into the sounds j-a-m.
Split digraph
A digraph that is split between a consonant (a-e in make). A split digraph usually changes the sound of the first vowel. For example, compare the pronunciation between hug and huge.
Tricky words
Words that are commonly used in English, but they have complex spelling patterns which make them difficult to read and write. For example, said, of and was.
Trigraph
A grapheme made up of three letters that makes one sound (igh in high).
Vowel
The letters a, e, i, o and u.
Big Cat Collins E-books for Remote Learning
Click on the PDF file for a 'how-to' guide to logging your child's e-book account.