You may have heard this word a lot if your child is a nursery or reception or they're about to go into one of those and you may have been thinking, 'What is phonics?'

Now when I was at school and I'm sure many of you as well, phonics was taught very differently so it can be quite confusing now to see the way that phonics is taught in schools and to really help your children with it when actually don't understand it because it's not the same as when you were at school.

So let's just break this down a bit.

Primarily phonics is the study of sounds in the English language or any language for that matter.

We use phonics to teach children how to identify different sounds so that they can read them and eventually write them.

Now sometimes reading and understanding the different sounds in the English language is something that we can all take for for granted because we just know how to do it but it's actually quite complex and I will go over that in the next few videos.

So in this video I'm going to focus mainly on Jolly Phonics which is a scheme used to teach phonics throughout the United Kingdom although if your child does use a different scheme at their school this information will still be relevant.

Okay so we all know that the English language has 26 letters in its alphabet, but there are more than 26 sounds in the English language.

Now I will just put a bit of a disclaimer here and say that phonics doesn't always cover everything and the English language is very complex it has lots of moving parts a lot of borrowed parts from other languages, so sometimes it doesn't always work but that's the English language for you.

So with the Jolly Phonics scheme every letter has a sound, an action and a song.

There is even a story to go with each sound.

In my videos I'm going to mainly focus on the sounds and the actions.

So for example the letter A is 'ah' and the action to go with that is to pretend that there are ants crawling up your arm like this: ah, ah, ah, ah.

Another example: B, which makes the sound 'buh' and you pretend that you're hitting a ball with a bat for this one so buh - buh - buh.

Some sounds lend themselves to more than one letter like /ck/ which can be used for either C or K.

Both C and K have their own songs to differentiate them but they both use the same action - ck, ck , ck - as if you're clicking castanets.

So the main thinking behind all of this is that a range of different learners will be able to benefit from Jolly Phonics because you have the visual which is the letter and the pictures that you have and then you have the sound which is obviously the songs and the sound itself and you also have the action so you're using a movement as well.

So combining all of that is a really strong learning tool.

Now of course because it is the English language it's not quite as simple as all of that.

So for example you have digraphs which are two letters but one sound.

We see this in the likes of 'sh' and 'ch' and many others.

There are also other sounds that lend themselves to three or even four letters all at once, but of course like everything in teaching and learning we start at the bottom and work our way up to those more difficult sounds.

Once children have some sounds under their belt they can then try to read some words.

The way the Jolly Phonics works is children don't learn the sounds in order of the alphabet they actually learn them in a way that will help them decipher words more quickly.

So for example if you did learn /a/, /b/ and /c/, you wouldn't really be able to make any words from that.

'Cab' (pause) I think it's just cab.

So in Jolly Phonics we actually learn /s/ /a/ and /t/ first. You then go on to learn /p/ /i/ and /n/ as well.

This means that you have two vowels and some consonants and you can make some really good three-letter words.

We call these CVC words because they are a consonant, a vowel and then a consonant.

For example you have the word 'cat'. /c/ /a/ /t/. Cat. You have a consonant, vowel and a consonant.

With these six letters that we learn first you can make a range of different words.

So that's why we learn these first instead of going through the alphabet.

As a teacher I've found Jolly Phonics to be a fantastic tool for teaching children to read and as with everything in early learning, practice and repetition are key.

So if your child is in Nursery or Reception you should expect to hear these sounds and songs and see the actions very frequently.

I mean a lot. You will be dreaming about them.

So once children can successfully identify different sounds, they move on to reading and start to stick all of those sounds together.

We call this 'segmenting' and 'blending'.

Segmenting is when we break up the word - /c/ /a/ /t/ - and blending is when we bring all of those sounds together to read the whole word: cat.

Now what I've just done with my arms are 'robot arms' and we often use that with children to help them really break up the word so: /c/ /a/ /t/ - cat.

If you'd like to know more about Jolly Phonics, the different sounds that we learn, how to help your child start reading and all the other fun that comes with phonics, please check out my other videos because you will find it all there.

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