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Lyndhurst Infant School

Lyndhurst Infant School

English

Welcome!

Please use the tabs on the left to find out more information about Literacy at Lyndhurst. You will also find some useful downloads and top tips to enable you to support your child at home.

How can I support my child at home?

  • Read regularly - please aim for at least 4 times a week and don't forget about Bug Club for Year 2 and Collins e-books for Early Years and Year 1
  • Share bedtime stories and let them see that you enjoy reading too!
  • Help them to learn to read any phonic sounds that are sent home
  • Help them to learn any spellings that are sent home
  • Encourage and support them to write for a purpose e.g. writing letters to family, sending post cards, making shopping lists etc

 

Tricky terminology!

The English curriculum uses a lot of technical terms. Below is a guide to some of the words you may hear but, please ask your child's class teacher if you have any questions.

Phoneme — The smallest unit of sound in a word. There are 44 phonemes in English. A phoneme may be represented by one, two, three or four letters, for example, to, train, night, through

Grapheme — A written representation of a sound. It may consist of one or more letters. For example, to write the sound ‘c’ we write it with the symbol (grapheme) ‘c’, to write the sound ‘shh’ we write it with the letters ‘s-h’. Some sounds have more than one grapheme e.g. the 'long a' sound can be written as ay, a, ai, a_e or eigh!

Digraph — Two letters representing one phoneme (sound). For example, ‘ea’ in bread, ‘ch’ in chat, or ‘ng’ in sing,

Trigraph – Three letters representing one sound: high, fudge

Long vowel phonemes - A long vowel sound is a sound which is the same as, or very similar to, the letter name of one of the vowels. These are usually written with a di- or trigraph e.g. ‘ai’ in rain; ‘igh' as in fight; ‘ee’ as in sheep.

Split digraph – This is when the sound is split by a consonant when written down. For example, the ‘long a’ sound in ‘cake, make, plate. Other examples; kite, chute, bone, etc.

Segment — To break a word or part of a word down into its component phonemes, for example: c-a-t; ch-a-t; ch-ar-t; g-r-ou-n-d.

Blending — Combining parts of a spoken word into a whole representation of the word. For example, /p/ /oo/ /l/ can be blended together to form the word ‘pool’.

Phase - These are the 'sections' that the phonics curriculum is broken down into in 'Letters and Sounds'. 

SPAG - This stands for 'spelling, punctuation and grammar'. The new National Curriculum (2015) has a much stronger focus on correct use of SPAG and sets out clear expectations for Years 1 and 2 regarding this.

CVC – Represents consonant – vowel – consonante.g. c-a-t, d-o-g,

High frequency words – Everyday words that are used a lot. For example; the, was, and, they, in, at, on, of, but, with, then, that, when

Exception words - These are also usually high frequency words but are referred to as 'tricky' because they contain spelling patterns that may not have been taught yet e.g. 'go' is a common word taught in Reception, but children would not usually come across the letter 'o' representing a long sound until Phase 5 is taught in Year 1.

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