Teaching Phonics: Phonics is the foundation of reading in UK schools, and getting it right matters from the very first lesson. The UK Government’s systematic synthetic phonics (SSP) framework, which became a statutory requirement in all schools in England, places phonics at the heart of early literacy teaching.
Yet knowing what phonics is and knowing how to teach it in ways that genuinely excite children are two very different things. LearningMole has worked with primary teachers and parents across the UK to develop practical, creative approaches that make phonics stick.
This guide moves well beyond the standard definition. It walks through the key terminology every teacher and parent needs, covers all six phases of the UK phonics curriculum, and then delivers twelve active, multisensory ways to teach phonics that don’t rely on a screen.
You’ll also find guidance on the Year 1 Phonics Screening Check, advice on avoiding the most common pronunciation error in phonics teaching, and support for children with English as an additional language (EAL). Whether you’re a Reception teacher planning your autumn term programme or a parent wondering how to support your child at home, the strategies here are practical and ready to use.
The activities in this article are drawn from real classroom experience. They use everyday materials, work for whole classes and small groups alike, and span the full range of learners you’ll find in a primary school, including children with SEND and those who speak English as an additional language. The UK National Curriculum expects children to be reading fluently by the end of Key Stage 1, and solid phonics teaching is the surest route to that goal.
Phonics has its own vocabulary, and using terms accurately matters when speaking with colleagues, parents, and inspectors. Here are the key terms every phonics teacher needs.
| Term | Definition | Example |
|---|---|---|
| Phoneme | The smallest unit of sound in spoken language | /k/ in ‘cat’ |
| Grapheme | The written letter(s) that represent a phoneme | ‘ea’ in ‘heat’ |
| GPC (Grapheme-Phoneme Correspondence) | The relationship between a written grapheme and its spoken phoneme | ‘sh’ = /sh/ |
| Blending | Merging individual phonemes to read a word | /c/ /a/ /t/ = ‘cat’ |
| Segmenting | Breaking a spoken word into its individual phonemes for spelling | ‘dog’ = /d/ /o/ /g/ |
| Digraph | Two letters that make one sound | ‘ch’, ‘sh’, ‘th’ |
| Trigraph | Three letters that make one sound | ‘igh’ in ‘night’ |
| Split digraph | A vowel digraph split by a consonant | ‘a_e’ in ‘cake’ |
| Tricky words | High-frequency words that cannot be fully decoded phonically | ‘the’, ‘said’, ‘was’ |
| CVC word | A consonant-vowel-consonant word; the basic decodable unit | ‘sit’, ‘map’, ‘top’ |
Understanding GPCs is central to systematic synthetic phonics. Each lesson introduces a new GPC, children practise blending and segmenting with it, and then apply it in reading and writing. This structured approach is what distinguishes SSP from older methods that relied on whole-word recognition.
The UK phonics framework progresses through six phases, typically spanning Nursery (EYFS) through Year 2. Each phase builds on the last, moving children from broad sound awareness through to reading and spelling complex multisyllabic words.
| Phase | Year Group | Key Learning |
|---|---|---|
| Phase 1 | Nursery / Early EYFS | Environmental sounds, rhythm, rhyme, oral blending and segmenting — no letters yet |
| Phase 2 | Reception (Autumn) | First 19 GPCs (s, a, t, p, i, n, m, d, g, o, c, k, ck, e, u, r, h, b, f, ff, l, ll, ss). Simple CVC words |
| Phase 3 | Reception (Spring/Summer) | Remaining GPCs including digraphs (ch, sh, th, ng) and vowel digraphs (ai, ee, igh, oa, oo). Simple sentences |
| Phase 4 | Reception (Summer) / Year 1 | No new GPCs. Consolidation. Reading and spelling CVCC and CCVC words. Tricky words |
| Phase 5 | Year 1 | Alternative graphemes for sounds already learned. Split digraphs. Wider range of decodable texts |
| Phase 6 | Year 2 | Spelling rules, prefixes, suffixes. Move from learning to decode to reading for meaning |
The Department for Education’s non-statutory Letters and Sounds guidance underpinned UK phonics teaching for many years, and many schools still use its phase structure as a reference point, even as they adopt DfE-validated SSP programmes such as Read Write Inc., Jolly Phonics, or Little Wandle Letters and Sounds Revised.
The best phonics activities are physical, memorable, and repeatable. Research consistently shows that multisensory input helps children retain GPCs more quickly than audio-visual methods alone. The activities below are grouped by approach so you can select what suits your class, your space, and your available resources.
Active phonics is particularly effective for children in EYFS and KS1, whose bodies need to move as much as their minds need to think.
Phonics Hopscotch: Draw a hopscotch grid with graphemes instead of numbers. Call out a phoneme, and children jump to the correct grapheme square. For Phase 3 and beyond, write digraphs in the squares to extend the challenge.
Walk the Sounds: Write graphemes on sheets of coloured paper and lay them on the floor. You call a phoneme, and children walk, hop, or jump to the correct card. At the word level, children walk from card to card, blending as they go.
Sounds Ball: Stand in a circle. The teacher says a phoneme and throws a ball to a child, who catches it and says a word containing that sound. In Phase 5, you can extend this: the teacher says a word, and children respond with the correct grapheme. This is one of the most useful five-minute warm-up activities for a whole class.
Magnet Sound Race: Place magnetic letter tiles face-up on the floor opposite a magnetic board on the wall. Call a sound; children race to find the correct magnetic letter and place it on the board. Works brilliantly for Year 1 consolidation of Phase 3 and 4 GPCs.
Writing phonemes in different textures and materials creates additional sensory memory traces that help GPCs become automatic.
Shaving Foam Writing: Spray a thin layer of shaving foam on each child’s table. Children use their fingers to write graphemes as you call them out. The tactile sensation, combined with the visual result, is highly memorable. Easy to reset by smoothing the foam.
Sand Tray Segmenting: Fill shallow trays with fine sand or salt. Children segment spoken words and write each grapheme in the sand before reading the word back. This slows the writing process in a useful way, giving children more processing time.
Sky Writing: Children use their whole arm to write graphemes in the air, forming each letter with large motor movements before moving to fine motor writing. Particularly useful for children who struggle with pencil grip or letter formation.
Taking phonics outside changes the energy in the session and gives you a bigger canvas to work with. These activities need nothing more than chalk and some space.
Chalk Grapheme Village: Draw large grapheme squares in chalk on the playground. Call phonemes and children run or skip to the correct square. Add a challenge by calling a tricky word: children must run to each grapheme in order.
Nature Sound Hunt: Give children a list of target initial sounds (or graphemes for Phase 3+). They hunt in the school garden or on a nature walk for objects that start with those sounds. A stone for /s/, a twig for /t/, and so on. Works especially well for Phase 2 consolidation.
Phonic Photo Hunter: Children take photographs (on a class device or tablet) of objects whose names contain the target phoneme. These images can then be sorted, labelled, and used to build a class phonics album that stays on display throughout the phase.
Mystery Box: Place four to six objects in a box, all starting with the same phoneme. Children take turns pulling an object out, naming it, and identifying the common sound. Extend this by including one or two distractor objects that don’t fit, and asking children to spot the odd one out.
Colour the Beginning Sounds: Children are given a large letter on A4 paper with small pictures inside it, only some of which start with that letter’s phoneme. Children colour the pictures that match and cross out the ones that don’t. This builds phonemic awareness and letter-sound connection simultaneously.
Erase the Item: Draw a detailed scene on the whiteboard containing a mix of objects. Pronounce a phoneme; children come up and erase the item whose name starts with that sound. Use Phase 3 and 4 digraphs to extend the activity: ‘Erase everything that starts with /sh/.’
The 5-Minute Phonics Bag Fill a small bag with six to eight everyday objects whose names cover the current phase’s target GPCs. On the walk to school, during breakfast, or in the car, take turns pulling out an object, naming it slowly, and counting the phonemes on your fingers. This takes no preparation, requires no screens, and gives young learners daily practice that reinforces classroom teaching. Parents often find this becomes a favourite morning routine.
The single most common phonics teaching error is adding an intrusive ‘schwa’ sound to consonants. When teachers say ‘muh’ instead of /m/, or ‘buh’ instead of /b/, children learn distorted phonemes that make blending much harder. A child trying to blend /buh/-/a/-/tuh/ does not arrive at ‘bat’; they arrive at a three-syllable muddle.
Pure sounds are consonant phonemes produced without the added vowel. For continuant consonants like /m/, /s/, /n/, /f/, and /l/, hold the sound until you run out of breath: ‘mmm’, ‘sss’, ‘nnn’. For stop consonants like /p/, /b/, /t/, /d/, /k/, and /g/, the sound is very short and clipped. There is no added vowel at all.
| Consonant Type | Examples | How to Produce the Pure Sound |
|---|---|---|
| Continuant (fricative) | /s/, /f/, /m/, /n/, /l/, /r/, /z/ | Hold the sound continuously: ‘sss’, ‘fff’, ‘mmm’ |
| Stop (plosive) | /p/, /b/, /t/, /d/, /k/, /g/ | Very short, clipped. No added vowel. ‘p’ not ‘puh’ |
| Affricates | /ch/, /j/ | Short and clipped. ‘ch’ as in ‘cheese’, not ‘chuh’ |
“Getting pure sounds right from the start is one of the most important things a teacher can do for early readers. Children who learn distorted phonemes often struggle with blending for months before anyone identifies the cause. A few minutes of pronunciation practice with staff before a phonics programme launches saves an enormous amount of remediation later.” Michelle Connolly, Founder of LearningMole and former teacher with over 15 years of classroom experience
LearningMole’s phonics video resources demonstrate pure sound production clearly, giving both teachers and parents a reliable audio reference for every phoneme in the programme. If you’re not confident about a particular sound, the videos are a useful benchmark before you teach it to children.
Children whose home language is not English may encounter phonemes that don’t exist in their first language. The voiced ‘th’ (as in ‘this’) and the unvoiced ‘th’ (as in ‘think’) are absent from many world languages, as is the /v/ sound. Arabic speakers often find the /p/ and /b/ distinction challenging; Hindi and Punjabi speakers may have difficulty with the short /ae/ vowel sound.
The strategies that help EAL learners most are: extra time with the physical production of difficult sounds (mirror work, watching mouth position), visual phoneme charts with mouth diagrams, pairing the target word with a translation equivalent where possible, and using familiar objects or images from the child’s cultural context in activities like the Mystery Box or Photo Hunter. The kinesthetic activities described earlier are particularly accessible for EAL learners because physical actions cross language barriers.
It is worth noting that EAL learners who have a literate first language often make faster progress through phonics than might be expected, because they bring existing phonemic awareness skills with them. The activities here work well for these learners too, as they shift the challenge from sound discrimination to GPC mapping.
The Phonics Screening Check is taken by all Year 1 children in England each June. It consists of 40 words: 20 real words and 20 pseudo-words (also called alien words or nonsense words). Children must apply their GPC knowledge to decode both types. The pseudo-words are typically accompanied by a picture of a cartoon alien, signalling to children that the word is invented.
Many parents find the inclusion of pseudo-words confusing. The educational reasoning is sound: because pseudo-words cannot be recognised from memory, they can only be decoded phonically. A child who has genuinely learned GPCs will decode them correctly; a child who has been memorising word shapes will not. Explaining this to parents before the check avoids unnecessary anxiety at home.
Schools are provided with a threshold score each year (historically around 32 out of 40). Children who do not meet the threshold in Year 1 are retested in Year 2. The best preparation is consistent, high-quality phonics teaching through Phase 5, with regular practice of the blending process using both real and made-up words from Phase 4 onwards.
Alien Word Preparation Activity From Year 1 onwards, incorporate pseudo-words into regular blending practice. Write four to five nonsense words on the board each morning alongside four to five real words. Children decode them, identify which are real and which are alien, and add a simple drawing of an alien next to the nonsense ones. This normalises alien words and removes the surprise element from the check itself.
Schools in England are legally required to use a DfE-validated SSP programme. This requirement emerged from a substantial body of research evidence, most notably the Rose Review (2006) and subsequent longitudinal studies, which consistently showed that children taught through SSP make significantly faster progress in reading than those taught through whole-language or mixed methods.
| Feature | Systematic Synthetic Phonics (SSP) | Whole Language Approach |
|---|---|---|
| Teaching method | Explicit, sequential GPC instruction from the start | Implicit learning through reading whole texts |
| Word decoding | Blending phonemes: ‘sound it out’ | Guessing from context and picture cues |
| Evidence base | Strong — supported by DfE, Rose Review, EEF | Weaker — declined in UK policy since 2006 |
| Legal status in England | Statutory in all maintained schools | Not permitted as the primary approach |
| Impact on struggling readers | Highly effective when taught with fidelity | Often leaves struggling readers behind |
LearningMole provides curriculum-aligned phonics resources designed specifically for UK primary schools, covering EYFS through Year 2 and beyond. The video library includes phonics sound demonstrations, blending and segmenting practice, and phase-by-phase activities that teachers can use for whole-class teaching or that parents can follow at home.
The LearningMole YouTube channel includes free phonics content accessible to all teachers and families. For full access to structured phonics resources, activity sheets, and the complete video library, LearningMole’s subscription gives schools and home educators everything they need to deliver high-quality phonics provision aligned to the UK National Curriculum.
Recommended resources for each phase:
Most DfE-validated SSP programmes begin with a set of high-frequency, easily distinguishable phonemes: commonly s, a, t, p, i, n. This ‘s-a-t-p-i-n’ sequence is used because it allows children to start building real words immediately (sat, pin, nip, tip, tan). The order then progresses through Phase 2 and into Phase 3, introducing digraphs once single-letter GPCs are secure. The specific sequence varies slightly between programmes such as Little Wandle, Read Write Inc., and Jolly Phonics, but all DfE-validated programmes have a principled, research-informed order. Avoid introducing similar-looking letters (b/d, p/q) at the same time, as this causes confusion.
The most effective interventions for struggling phonics learners involve shorter, more frequent sessions rather than longer, less frequent ones. Ten minutes of daily one-to-one or small-group blending practice outperforms a single weekly hour. Multisensory approaches, particularly the physical and tactile activities described in this article, help children who are not making progress through standard whole-class teaching. Check that the child has secure oral blending and segmenting skills before pushing forward with grapheme recognition. For children with suspected dyslexia or other reading difficulties, structured literacy approaches such as Sounds-Write or Toe by Toe may be more appropriate than standard SSP, and SENDCO involvement is recommended.
Phase 1 of the UK phonics framework begins in Nursery, typically from age three, with activities focused on environmental sounds, rhythm, rhyme, and alliteration. No letters or graphemes are introduced at this stage; the focus is entirely on developing phonological awareness. Phase 2, where children start learning their first GPCs, typically begins in Reception, from age four to five. By the end of Reception, most children following a well-delivered SSP programme know all Phase 2 and Phase 3 GPCs and can read simple decodable sentences. Children who begin school with strong oral language and phonological awareness often progress through the early phases quickly.
Tricky words (also called common exception words) are high-frequency words that contain irregular GPCs or GPCs that have not yet been taught in the current phase. Words like ‘the’, ‘said’, ‘was’, ‘come’, and ‘are’ cannot be fully decoded using the phonics knowledge children have at the time they first encounter them. They need to be learned as partially phonically decodable sight words until the relevant GPCs are taught. It helps to show children which part of a tricky word is decodable (e.g., the /s/ and /d/ in ‘said’) and which part is the ‘tricky’ bit to remember. Avoid referring to these as ‘sight words’ in a way that implies they must be memorised as whole shapes; the phonics knowledge children are building will eventually explain most of the ‘tricky’ parts.
The most effective home phonics activities are brief, playful, and don’t feel like school. The 5-Minute Phonics Bag described earlier is a reliable daily routine that takes no preparation. Chalk activities in the garden or on the pavement are popular with young children and easy to set up. Reading decodable books together, where the text genuinely matches the child’s current phase, builds confidence quickly; avoid books that ask children to guess from pictures, as these undermine phonics skills. Playing I Spy with phoneme targets (‘I spy something beginning with the sound /ch/’) is a natural game for car journeys and walks. The key is little and often rather than long, infrequent sessions.
A digraph is two letters that represent a single phoneme. Common consonant digraphs include ‘ch’ (as in ‘chip’), ‘sh’ (as in ‘ship’), ‘th’ (as in ‘thin’ or ‘this’), and ‘ng’ (as in ‘ring’). Vowel digraphs include ‘ai’ (as in ‘rain’), ‘ee’ (as in ‘feet’), ‘oa’ (as in ‘boat’), and ‘oo’ (as in ‘moon’ or ‘book’). A trigraph is three letters making one sound, such as ‘igh’ in ‘night’ or ‘ear’ in ‘hear’. The term ‘split digraph’ (previously called ‘magic e’) refers to a vowel digraph split by a consonant, such as the ‘a_e’ in ‘cake’, where the ‘a’ and the ‘e’ work together to make the /ae/ sound even though they are not adjacent.
The evidence base strongly supports systematic synthetic phonics over whole-language or ‘look and say’ approaches for teaching early reading. The DfE’s 2006 Rose Review, the Education Endowment Foundation’s evidence summaries, and international research from Australia and the United States all point to the same conclusion: SSP produces better outcomes for more children, particularly for those who are at risk of reading difficulties. The UK’s requirement that all maintained schools use a DfE-validated SSP programme reflects this evidence. ‘Look and say’ approaches remain influential in some home learning contexts, but there is no robust evidence that they produce comparable outcomes to well-delivered SSP, and some evidence that they can hinder progress for children who are already finding phonics challenging.
The Phonics Screening Check is a short, individual assessment conducted by a teacher with each Year 1 child in June. It takes approximately five to ten minutes per child. The check consists of 40 words on a card, presented one word at a time: 20 real words and 20 pseudo-words (alien words). Children read each word aloud; the teacher records whether the response is correct or incorrect. There is no time limit and no pass/fail in the traditional sense, but a threshold score is set each year (typically around 32 out of 40). Children who do not meet the threshold are re-checked in Year 2. Results are reported to parents and used by schools to identify children who need additional phonics support. Teachers do not receive the word list in advance; the check is designed to assess applied phonics knowledge rather than rehearsed responses.
Teaching phonics well is one of the highest-leverage things a primary teacher or parent can do. Getting children to the point where they can decode unfamiliar words independently is the gateway to everything else in literacy, and beyond that, to every other subject in the curriculum. The twelve activities in this article are not exhaustive, but they cover the most important approaches: physical, tactile, outdoor, and creative, each grounded in what the research says about how children learn sound-letter relationships most effectively.
The combination of pure sound teaching, structured phase progression, multisensory activity, and consistent daily practice gives children the best possible start with reading. LearningMole’s phonics resources, including the video library and activity materials, are designed to support both classroom teachers planning lessons and parents reinforcing that learning at home. UK primary education has one of the strongest phonics frameworks in the world. Used well, it works.
If you found this guide useful, LearningMole has a wide range of further phonics resources, including phase-specific video collections, decodable reading support, and activities for children with EAL or SEND. Explore the full phonics library at LearningMole, or visit the YouTube channel for free video resources that work for both classroom and home use.
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