What is Phonics? If your child has just started Reception or Year 1, phonics is probably the most talked-about thing in their classroom right now. Schools across the UK use systematic synthetic phonics as the primary method for teaching children to read and spell, and for good reason: it gives children a reliable, logical code for cracking written English.
LearningMole, a UK educational platform founded by former primary teacher Michelle Connolly, has produced hundreds of phonics videos and teaching resources aligned with the National Curriculum, because understanding what phonics is and how it works makes a real difference to how confidently you can support a child at home or in the classroom.
Phonics works by teaching children the relationship between the individual sounds in spoken language (called phonemes) and the letters or groups of letters that represent them on the page (called graphemes). English has 44 sounds, but only 26 letters, so the relationship between sound and spelling is not always straightforward. Phonics teaching gives children a systematic way to decode words they have never seen before, rather than asking them to memorise thousands of whole words by sight.
This guide covers everything you need to know: how phonics works, what the different phases involve, what terms like digraph and split digraph actually mean, how the Year 1 Phonics Screening Check works, and how you can support phonics learning at home. Whether you are a parent trying to make sense of your child’s reading book, a teaching assistant new to phonics, or a teacher looking for a refresher on the underlying principles, this guide gives you the practical grounding to help.
Phonics gives children two essential reading and spelling skills: blending to read and segmenting to spell. Both rely on an understanding of phonemes and graphemes, so those two terms are worth getting clear first.
A phoneme is the smallest unit of sound in a word. The word “cat” has three phonemes: /k/, /a/, /t/. The word “ship” also has three phonemes: /sh/, /i/, /p/, even though it has four letters, because “sh” represents a single sound. English has 44 phonemes in total.
A grapheme is the written representation of a phoneme. A grapheme can be one letter (like “s”) or several letters working together to represent a single sound (like “sh”, “igh”, or “ough”). One of the key jobs of phonics teaching is showing children that the same sound can be spelt in different ways, and the same spelling can sometimes represent different sounds.
Blending means looking at the letters in a word, saying each phoneme, and pushing the sounds together to read the whole word. Teachers sometimes call this “robot talk”. A child learning to read “dog” would say /d/… /o/… /g/… “dog”. This takes real practice in the early stages, but once children can blend fluently, it unlocks every new word they encounter.
Parent Tip: Oral blending before written blending Before your child tries to blend words on the page, practise oral blending out loud. Say a segmented word slowly, “/c/… /u/… /p/”, and ask them what word that is. This trains their ear before their eye has to do the work. Most children need several weeks of oral blending practice before printed words click into place.
Segmenting is the reverse process. To spell a word, a child listens to the whole word, breaks it into its individual phonemes, and then writes the grapheme for each sound. To spell “fish”, they would identify /f/, /i/, /sh/ and write the letters for each. Blending and segmenting are complementary skills, and progress in one usually supports progress in the other.
In England, phonics teaching broadly follows a phased progression rooted in the Department for Education’s Letters and Sounds framework. Different schools use different validated schemes; Little Wandle, Read Write Inc (RWI), and Jolly Phonics are among the most common, but all follow a similar sequence of increasing complexity.
| Phase | Typical Stage | What Children Learn |
|---|---|---|
| Phase 1 | Nursery / early Reception | Listening to environmental sounds, rhythm and rhyme, oral blending and segmenting. No letters yet, building the ear for sound. |
| Phase 2 | Reception (Autumn) | First 19 grapheme-phoneme correspondences, including s, a, t, p, i, n. CVC words. Simple captions and sentences. |
| Phase 3 | Reception (Spring/Summer) | Remaining GPCs including digraphs (ch, th, sh, ng) and vowel digraphs (ai, ee, igh, oa, oo). Two-syllable words. |
| Phase 4 | Reception (Summer) / early Y1 | Consolidation phase. No new GPCs. Children learn words with adjacent consonants: CCVC (e.g. “stop”) and CVCC (e.g. “melt”). |
| Phase 5 | Year 1 | Alternative spellings for known sounds. Alternative pronunciations for known graphemes. High-frequency words. |
| Phase 6 | Year 2 and beyond | Focus shifts to spelling: prefixes, suffixes, past tense, homophones, and morphological awareness. |
Phase 1 is often the most underestimated phase. Many parents focus on letter sounds, but the groundwork, listening carefully, discriminating between sounds, and enjoying rhyme, is what makes later decoding possible.
Teacher Tip: Protect Phase 1 Nursery and Reception teachers sometimes feel pressure to move quickly to letter sounds, but Phase 1 listening activities, sound walks, clapping syllables, I-Spy with initial sounds, build the phonemic awareness that makes everything else easier. LearningMole’s phonics videos include Phase 1 activities designed for whole-class and small-group use at the EYFS stage.
Phonics has its own vocabulary, and it can feel overwhelming when you first encounter it in a school letter or a parents’ evening.
| Term | Plain English | Example |
|---|---|---|
| Phoneme | A single unit of sound in a word | /sh/ in “ship” is one phoneme |
| Grapheme | The letter(s) that represent a phoneme | “sh” is the grapheme for /sh/ |
| GPC | Grapheme-Phoneme Correspondence | The letter “c” represents the sound /k/ in “cat” |
| Digraph | Two letters that together make one sound | “ch” in “chip”, “th” in “that” |
| Trigraph | Three letters that together make one sound | “igh” in “night”, “tch” in “watch” |
| Split digraph | Two vowels separated by a consonant that work together — “magic e” | “a-e” in “cake” |
| Blending | Pushing individual sounds together to read a whole word | /d/-/o/-/g/ blended = “dog” |
| Segmenting | Breaking a word into individual sounds to spell it | “fish” segmented = /f/-/i/-/sh/ |
| CVC word | Consonant-Vowel-Consonant word | “cat”, “sit”, “pin” |
| Tricky word | A high-frequency word that cannot be decoded phonetically | “the”, “said”, “was” |
| Phoneme frame | A visual grid where each box holds one phoneme | [ d ][ o ][ g ] for “dog” |
One of the most common mistakes in phonics teaching, and one that causes real problems for blending, is adding an unwanted vowel sound (the “schwa”) to the end of consonants. If you say “muh” instead of “m”, “buh” instead of “b”, or “duh” instead of “d”, blending becomes almost impossible. A child taught “cuh-ah-tuh” will struggle to hear “cat”.
Pure sounds are consonant phonemes produced without any trailing vowel. “M” is a humming sound: /mmmmm/. “S” is a sustained hiss: /ssss/. “T” is a tiny tap of the tongue behind the top teeth. Short stop sounds like /p/, /b/, /t/, /d/, /k/, /g/ cannot avoid a tiny amount of schwa; keep it as brief as possible.
Parent Tip: The pure sounds check Before practising phonics with your child, check your own sounds. Search for a “pure sounds” video on the LearningMole YouTube channe, hearing a teacher model the correct articulation is the fastest way to recalibrate if you have picked up the “uh” habit. A few minutes watching and repeating will prevent weeks of confusion for your child.
The Year 1 Phonics Screening Check is a short assessment administered to all Year 1 pupils in England each June. Children read 40 words aloud, 20 real words and 20 “pseudo-words” (sometimes called alien words or nonsense words), to a teacher who records which they can read correctly. It takes around 5 to 10 minutes and is not a stressful, formal exam.
The check is designed to identify children who have not yet secured phonics decoding well enough to progress to fluent reading. Children who do not meet the expected threshold in Year 1 are supported and re-checked in Year 2.
The pseudo-words are the part that confuses parents most. Why is my child being asked to read words like “grop” or “stannick”? The answer is deliberate: pseudo-words cannot be recognised by sight, so a child who reads them correctly must be genuinely decoding, applying their phonics knowledge rather than relying on memory or guessing from context.
In the check, alien words are marked with a picture of a creature to signal to the child that this is a made-up word. Children who have been taught phonics well find alien words no more difficult than real words, because they apply the same process: see the graphemes, say the phonemes, blend them together.
Parent Tip: Demystifying alien words at home Practise pseudo-words at home by making up your own. Write a simple CVC or CCVC nonsense word on a card and ask your child to read the alien word. Make it a game. Children who find alien words stressful are often those who have learnt to rely on guessing words from pictures or initial letters rather than full decoding. LearningMole phonics screening practice papers include pseudo-word practice sets.
Teacher note: “The Phonics Screening Check is a useful diagnostic tool, not a pass/fail test of a child’s worth. I used the results to identify which specific phonemes a child had not yet secured, and targeted my teaching from there. A child who misreads pseudo-words consistently is telling you something very specific about where their decoding has gaps,” says Michelle Connolly, Founder of LearningMole and former teacher with over 15 years of classroom experience.
The DfE validates a number of phonics programmes, and schools are required to use one of them. Knowing which one your child’s school uses helps you support their learning at home with the same language and resources.
| Scheme | Overview | Notes for Parents |
|---|---|---|
| Little Wandle Letters and Sounds Revised | A complete phonics programme covering phases 2-5 with decodable books matched to each phase. Widely used in UK primary schools. | Books are sent home at the exact phase your child is working at. Reading them correctly is more important than finishing them quickly. |
| Read Write Inc (RWI) | Developed by Ruth Miskin. Uses “Fred Talk” (robot talk) for blending. Colour-banded books matched to reading levels. | Children refer to pure sounds as “Fred sounds”. “Fred in your head” means silent blending before speaking the word. |
| Jolly Phonics | Uses actions, songs, and stories for each phoneme. Often used in EYFS and early KS1 as a multisensory approach. | Teaches graphemes in groups rather than alphabetical order: s, a, t, i, p, n first. |
| Floppy’s Phonics / Biff, Chip and Kipper | Part of the Oxford Reading Tree series. A phonics-based programme integrated with familiar characters. | Books are decodable at each level. If a child is guessing from pictures, encourage them to go back to blending the actual letters. |
If you are not sure which scheme your school uses, ask the class teacher. Most schools are happy to send home a guide to the sounds in order and the terminology they use. The key point is that all validated schemes teach the same underlying phonics knowledge; the terms and book colours may vary, but the phonemes and the blending process are the same.
You don’t need to be a teacher to support your child’s phonics progress. The most effective home support is consistent, brief, and low-pressure. Ten minutes of phonics practice three or four times a week makes more difference than an hour on a Sunday.
“Parents sometimes worry they will confuse their child if they use different words or methods to those used in school. The truth is that if you focus on the sounds rather than the letter names, keep your phoneme pronunciation pure, and encourage your child to decode rather than guess, you are doing exactly the right thing,” says Michelle Connolly, Founder of LearningMole and former teacher with over 15 years of classroom experience.
LearningMole provides a range of phonics videos, printable resources, and teaching materials for both classroom and home use, all aligned with the UK National Curriculum and the phases described in this guide.
For teachers, LearningMole’s phonics video resources work well as whole-class lesson starters, small-group catch-up support, and home-learning recommendations for parents.
English has 44 phonemes in total: approximately 24 consonant sounds and 20 vowel sounds. These are the building blocks of every English word. Phonics teaching introduces them gradually across Phases 2-5, starting with the most common single-letter graphemes and progressing to digraphs, trigraphs, and alternative spellings. Not all 44 are needed to start reading. Phase 2 covers just 19 GPCs, enough to begin blending simple CVC words.
A split digraph, often called “magic e”, is a vowel pair separated by a consonant that together represent a single long vowel sound. In the word “cake”, the letters “a” and “e” form a split digraph (“a-e”): the “e” at the end changes the short /a/ sound in “cat” to the long /ai/ sound in “cake”. Common split digraphs include a-e (cake), i-e (kite), o-e (home), and u-e (cube). Children typically meet split digraphs in Phase 5.
Keep it concrete and playful. You might say: “Letters are pictures of sounds. The letter ‘s’ makes the /ssss/ sound like a snake. When we read, we look at the pictures and say the sounds, then push them together to hear the word.” Focus on sounds rather than letter names at this stage, and turn everything into a game. Children who enjoy sound play, singing, rhyming, and clapping syllables are building the foundation for phonics without realising it.
Formal phonics teaching typically starts in Reception, usually at age 4 or 5. However, Phase 1 activities (listening to sounds, enjoying rhyme, oral blending) are appropriate from Nursery age and often begin at 3. The DfE’s expectations for phonics are established by the end of Year 1, with the Phonics Screening Check taken in June of Year 1.
Pure sounds are consonant phonemes produced without adding an unwanted vowel (the “schwa”) at the end. If phonemes are taught as “buh”, “cuh”, “duh” rather than /b/, /k/, /d/, blending becomes very difficult because the child tries to blend the extra vowels too. Saying “cuh-ah-tuh” does not naturally blend to “cat”. For stop sounds like /p/, /b/, /t/, /d/, /k/, /g/, the schwa cannot be eliminated entirely; aim to keep it as brief as possible.
First, check pure sounds. If phonemes are being said with a trailing schwa, blending will be very difficult. Next, try oral blending before moving to written words. Some children need more time in the oral stage. Magnetic letters can help make the process physical and visual. If difficulties persist across several weeks, speak to the class teacher: they can identify which specific phonemes are insecure and target practice accordingly. LearningMole’s blending videos break the process into very small steps [Link: BLENDING-GUIDE].
Pseudo-words (alien words) are used in the Year 1 Phonics Screening Check to confirm that children are genuinely decoding rather than recognising whole words by sight. A child who can read “storg” or “blim” is demonstrating that they can apply their phonics knowledge to any combination of sounds, which is precisely the skill that allows them to decode unfamiliar real words as their reading develops. Practising alien words at home with simple nonsense word cards prepares children for the check without stress.
Phonics is a method of teaching reading and spelling that links sounds to their written representations. Phonetics is the broader academic study of the sounds of human speech. It covers how sounds are produced physically, how they are perceived, and how they vary across languages. In primary education, you will nearly always be referring to phonics. The two words are sometimes confused, but for everything to do with your child’s reading and the Year 1 Screening Check, phonics is the correct term.
Phonics is not a new or fashionable idea; systematic teaching of letter-sound relationships has been central to reading instruction in English-speaking countries for decades, and the evidence base for systematic synthetic phonics is strong and consistent.
What has changed is how universally it is now applied in English primary schools: since the introduction of the Year 1 Phonics Screening Check in 2012 and the DfE’s continued emphasis on validated schemes, virtually every child in England is taught to read using a structured phonics approach. Understanding the basics gives you a genuine advantage in supporting a child’s early literacy, whether you are a parent, a teaching assistant, or a teacher moving into a new year group.
The most important things to take away from this guide are straightforward: phonics works by linking sounds to their spellings; blending and segmenting are the two core skills; phases provide a structured progression from simple to complex; and pure sounds matter far more than most parents realise. If you can model correct phoneme production, encourage your child to decode rather than guess, and keep practice sessions brief and positive, you are already doing the most effective thing possible to support their reading development.
LearningMole’s phonics resources cover every phase of the journey, from Phase 1 listening activities for Nursery children through to Phase 5 alternative spellings for Year 1. Whether you are looking for videos to use in class, printable sound mats, or practice papers for the Phonics Screening Check, you will find resources designed by experienced educators and aligned with the UK National Curriculum. Explore the full phonics library or browse the free video resources on the LearningMole YouTube channel.
Leave a Reply