Assistant Principal Report 

Dear Parents and Carers,

How You Can Support with Phonics Learning

Phonics is one of the essential elements of learning to read, alongside phonemic awareness, vocabulary, fluency and comprehension.

Phonics involves the recognition of sounds (phonemes) and the symbol/letter representation of these sounds (graphemes). For students to become fluent readers, they must be taught all the common ways of representing English speech sounds (phonemes).

Our school is implementing the Departments Phonics Plus synthetic phonics program; however we have staff previously trained in the Sounds Write approach, which has similar elements to Phonics Plus.

Below are some resources and learning available to parents, to help you implement similar phonics practice at home. These are related to the Sounds Write approach.

Sounds Write- Supporting your child’s phonics and phonological awareness skills

Sounds Write is a systematic, linguistic phonics program. The program focuses on teaching sounds (phonemes) and spellings (graphemes), alongside the phonological awareness skills of segmenting words into sounds, blending sounds into words and manipulating the sounds in words to make new ones. The program focuses on both reading words and spelling and is supported by the use of decodable readers.

The Sounds Write team offer some online professional learning and resources for parents. If you have pre-school/kinder children, this online learning is also great resource for you- and it’s free!

Support for Parents and Carers- Sounds Write Website:

This page provides resources for parents including online training courses, free decodable texts and access to the Sounds Write podcast.

Support for Parents and Carers - Sounds-Write

Online Course – Help Your Child to Read and Write:

This first course includes all the know-how and resources to get your child started, by introducing all the one-to-one spellings in the context of word reading, word building and sound-swap with simple CVC (consonant, vowel, consonant) words, as well as the skills they need to succeed.

You can access the course here:

Free Early Childhood Education Tutorial - Help your child to read and write | Udemy

Initial Code app:

If you have an iPad you can download the app that supports the program. It is called Initial Code, by Sounds-Write Ltd. There is a free version of the app with some sample lessons, and a full version for sale too. The app offers a variety of activities to develop the skills of segmenting and blending, word reading and writing and some sentence reading and writing. The app has been designed to introduce the sound-spelling correspondences in the Initial Code of the Sounds-Write program. The activities in the app are similar to those being practiced in the classroom.

Sarah Mills

Assistant Principal