www.letters-and-sounds.com - Free resources for Letters and Sounds
phonics
What is
Letters and Sounds?
Letters and Sounds is a phonics resource published by the Department for Education and
Skills in 2007. It aims to build children's speaking and listening skills in their own right as well as to
prepare children for learning to read by developing their phonic knowledge and skills. It sets out a detailed
and systematic programme for teaching phonic skills for children starting by the age of five, with the aim of
them becoming fluent readers by age seven.
There are six overlapping phases. The table below is a summary based on the Letters and Sounds
guidance for Practioners and Teachers. For more detailed information, visit the Letters and Sounds website.
Phase
Phonic Knowledge and Skills
Phase One (Nursery/Reception)
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 (Reception) up to 6 weeks
Learning 19 letters of the alphabet and one sound for each. Blending sounds together
to make words. Segmenting words into their separate sounds. Beginning to read simple captions.
Phase Three (Reception) up to 12 weeks
The remaining 7 letters of the alphabet, one sound for each. Graphemes such as ch, oo,
th representing the remaining phonemes not covered by single letters. Reading captions, sentences
and questions. On completion of this phase, children will have learnt the "simple code", i.e. one
grapheme for each phoneme in the English language.
Phase Four (Reception) 4 to 6 weeks
No new grapheme-phoneme correspondences are taught in this phase. Children learn to
blend and segent longer words with adjacet consonants, e.g. swim, clap, jump.
Phase Five (Throughout Year 1)
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 (Throughout Year 2 and beyond)
Working on spelling, including prefixes and suffixes, doubling and dropping letters
etc.
Letters and Sounds is a phonics resource published by the Department for Education and
Skills in 2007. It aims to build children's speaking and listening skills in their own right as well as to
prepare children for learning to read by developing their phonic knowledge and skills. It sets out a detailed
and systematic programme for teaching phonic skills for children starting by the age of five, with the aim of
them becoming fluent readers by age seven.
