Phonics Phase One

Summary of Phase One

Phase One activities concentrate on developing children's speaking and listening skills, phonological awareness and oral blending and segmenting. These skills are the precursor to reading and writing and will get children off to a good start.

In Phase One children are encouraged to listen carefully - first to environmental sounds, instrumental sounds and the sounds that they can make with their own bodies, then to favourite nursery rhymes and rhythms, and finally to the beginning sounds of words and the way in which words are made up of blended sounds.

It is important that children are able to hear the sounds around them as this will help them to hear and discriminate between the different sounds within words. Phase One is also beneficial by helping children develop their speaking skills by enlarging their vocabulary. It introduces children to a lot of the words that they will need to know in the following phases of Letters and Sounds.

Phase One is broken down into seven aspects:

Aspect 1: Environmental sounds
Aspect 2: Instrumental sounds
Aspect 3: Body percussion
Aspect 4: Rhythm and rhyme
Aspect 5: Alliteration
Aspect 6: Voice sounds
Aspect 7: Oral blending and segmenting

You don’t need to ‘teach’ the aspects in any particular order. Try to include the aspects into your everyday activities by talking about the sounds that you can hear or that toys and instruments make; sing action songs and rhymes; read rhyming stories; include sounds in your story time.