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Letters and Sounds is a phonics resource by the Department for Education. It aims to build children's speaking and listening skills as well as preparing children for learning to read and write by developing their phonic knowledge and skills.
There are six overlapping phases.
Phase |
Phonic Knowledge and Skills |
|
Phase One |
Activities are divided into seven aspects, including environmental sounds, instrumental sounds, body sounds, rhythm and rhyme, alliteration, voice sounds and finally oral blending and segmenting. |
|
Phase Two |
Learning 19 letters sounds. Blending sounds together to make words. Segmenting words into their separate sounds to help write words. Beginning to read and write simple captions. |
| Phase Three | The remaining 7 letters of the alphabet, one sound for each. Next, graphemes such as ch, oo, th representing two letters but one sound. Focusing on reading and writing captions and sentences. |
|
Phase Four |
No new grapheme-phoneme correspondences are taught in this phase. Children learn to blend and segment longer words with adjacent consonants, e.g. swim, clap, jump. |
| Phase Five | Now we move on to the "complex code". Children learn more graphemes for the phonemes which they already know, plus different ways of pronouncing the graphemes they already know. |
| Phase Six | Working on spelling, including prefixes and suffixes, doubling and dropping letters etc. |
Phase 6
At the start of Phase Six of Letters and Sounds, children will have already learnt the most frequently occurring grapheme–phoneme correspondences (GPCs) in the English language. They will be able to read many familiar words automatically. When they come across unfamiliar words they will in many cases be able to decode them quickly and quietly using their well-developed sounding and blending skills. With more complex unfamiliar words they will often be able to decode them by sounding them out.
At this stage children should be able to spell words phonemically although not always correctly. In Phase Six the main aim is for children to become more fluent readers and more accurate spellers.