Phonics with the parents

Judy Noy

Many parents are keen to help their children learn their spellings. However, with the current synthetic approach to phonics teaching, spelling tests are disappearing, except for high frequency words with ‘tricky bits’.

Early in Reception most children are introduced to letter groups, usually using programmes such as Jolly Phonics, which supports Letters and Sounds (see pages 18-20 for a comprehensive breakdown). Parents therefore receive graphemes from school, rather than words to learn, and are encouraged to help their children to blend and segment using these letters.

Parents are often unfamilar with the different methods to teach reading