What's Happening In English?

At Mackellar Primary School, students in Prep to Grade 2 learn phonics through the Sounds-Write program. Sounds-Write is a research-based approach that helps children develop the skills and knowledge they need to become confident readers and spellers.

In Sounds-Write lessons, students learn four key ideas:                                                                                                   

1. Letters are symbols that represent sounds.
2. A sound can be spelled with one, two, three or even four letters. For example, dog, street, night, dough.
3. The same sound can be spelled in different ways. For example, rain, break, stay, gate.
4. The same spelling can represent different sounds. For example, head, seat, break.

Students also practise three important skills:

1. Segmenting: breaking words into their individual sounds.
2. Blending: pushing sounds together to read words.
3. Phoneme manipulation: adding, removing or changing sounds in words. This helps students work out the correct spelling when one spelling pattern can represent different sounds.

These concepts and skills work together to build strong foundations for reading and spelling.

At home, you can help support your child’s reading by:

• Reading with your child every day. Talk about new words, point out patterns, and enjoy stories together.
• Encouraging sounding out. If your child gets stuck on a word, prompt them to “say the sounds and read the word.”
• Playing word games such as: “What word do you get if you change the /m/ in map to /t/?” or “What is sun without the /s/?”
• Noticing sounds in daily life. Look at signs, labels or shopping lists and ask, “What sounds can you hear in this word?”

If you have any questions or would like to know more about the Sounds-Write program, please see your child’s classroom teacher.

Elyse Burgess