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Phonics - Letters and Sounds


At Northdown, we follow the Letters and Sounds phonics programme. The aim is to equip children with the skills needed for learning to read by developing their phonic knowledge and skills as well as building children's speaking and listening skills.

The programme consists of six phases. The table below is a summary based on the Letters and Sounds guidance for Practitioners and Teachers.


(Table taken from 'www.letters-and-sounds-com')


Phonic Knowledge and Skills

Phase One (Nursery/Reception)


Phase Two (Reception) up to 6 weeks


Phase Four (Reception) 4 to 6 weeks

Phase Six (Throughout Year 2 and beyond)




Useful Websites:

Useful Vocabulary


Phoneme -  The smallest unit of sound. There are approximately 44 phonemes in English (it depends on different accents). Phonemes can be put together to make words.


GPC -  This is short for Grapheme Phoneme Correspondence. Knowing a GPC means being able to match a phoneme to a grapheme and vice versa.

Digraph -  A grapheme containing two letters that makes just one sound (phoneme).

Trigraph -  A grapheme containing three letters that makes just one sound (phoneme).


Segmenting -  This involves hearing a word, splitting it up into the phonemes (sound talk/sounding out) that make it, using knowledge of GPCs to work out which graphemes represent those phonemes and then writing those graphemes down in the right order.