In Reception, the children will start ‘Phase 2’ phonics by week 2.

Children will begin to use phonics language such as ‘grapheme’ and ‘phoneme’.

Grapheme – A letter or group of letters used to represent a particular phoneme when writing e.g. (the letter in print – ‘g’)

Phoneme – The smallest unit of sound that can be identified in words. We sometimes simply call this a ‘sound’, although it is helpful for children to use the term ‘phoneme’ from the beginning of our programme.

The children are taught 4 new GPCs (grapheme phoneme correspondence) and review and revise GPCs and words, daily, weekly and across terms and years, in order to move this knowledge into their long term memory.

All the graphemes and phonemes taught are practiced in words, sentences, and later on, in fully decodable books. 

Children will begin to talk about ‘Tricky Words’. Tricky words are high-frequency words that, although decodable in themselves, cannot be decoded by children using the GPCs they have been taught up to that point. Not all high-frequency words are ‘tricky words’. Many tricky words cease to be tricky in the later stages of our programme, as more GPCs are learned.

See the table below to find out what the children will be learning each week, during Autumn 1. 

Use this video to find out how to pronounce the sounds your child is learning:

In Autumn 2, the children will be introduced to ‘digraphs’.

Digraph – A grapheme using two letters to represent one phoneme. With children, we frequently reinforce it with the mantra ‘two letters, one sound’. At the appropriate stage, it is useful for children to learn to use the term and to understand what it means.

During the Autumn term, your child will also be involved with lots of activities to practice blending their sounds together to read words. We will support your child with this at school and along with your support at home, your child will be able to blend by Christmas. See the video below to see how your child is taught to blend. 

See the table below to find out what the children will be learning each week, during Autumn 2.