Using Phonics to Approach Spellings

For this book, your child will still need to draw on phonics already known. Please find below some useful resources. The mats will help you and your child to sound words out before spelling and help you to talk about spelling choices.

If you would like your teacher to add sound buttons to your child's spelling books, do ask. They help with spelling, as well as reading. They stop, for example, a child sounding 'o' and then 'u' when the 'ou' grapheme is needed. The curved line shows where there is a split-digraph (in this case, the 'a' makes a longer /ay/ sound. This is another reason why the phonics resources are such a useful reference tool to support knowledge at home. 

The files below show how to pronounce each phoneme and the associated graphemes. To listen to these click here.

As a reminder, phonemes are the sounds that letters make. Graphemes are the way that these are written down. Digraphs are two letters that make one sound (like 'oo'). Trigraphs are three letters that make one sound (like 'igh'). When using sound buttons, these have a line underneath. Fuller definitions are below.