About Phonics

Why is reading so Important?

When you can read you can see the words come alive or imagine the smells or sink into the visions being created by words.

Being able to read is a vital life skill as well.

Many children do learn to read quite naturally.

But for those who don't – trugs – a phonically structured reading resource – is the answer.

What is Phonics?

The 1992 Chambers English Dictionary defines phonics as 'the science of sound, or spoken sounds'

There are many words, terms and explanations used to express how words, letters and sounds are constructed and dissected. For example: phonic/phonetics/synthetic phonics/ graphemes phonemes/syllables/digraphs/diphthongs/vowel combinations/split digraphs/initial blends/final blends/segmentation and more!

What actually happens with the English Language is that letters of the alphabet are put together and words are constructed. Patterns emerge that can be categorised and these are given names (see above). This enables people to have strings of similar words with specific patterns in them.

What we call them matters to the professionals who can then converse with each other. So that when discussing a phoneme like /m/ we know the sound is /m/ as in ‘man’. We learn about the graphemes, the way we write a sound, like ‘igh’. Then there are examples of diphthongs and digraphs like ‘train’ and ‘coil’

But the children and students learning to read do not need to know this. It is the last thing they want to know. After all they just want to learn to read! Parents and carers do not need to know this, they just want to do everything they can to help, and not hinder the process of learning to read.

How trugs is phonically structured.

Joanna has dissected the English Language and taken the important phonics and grouped them into 15 Reading Stages. These stages are progressive and follow a phonically based structure. As each reading stage is encountered there are instructions and a clue card to explain the next group of phonics.

There are 44 phonemes generally recognised as those of British Received Pronunciation. 29 of the phonemes are introduced within Box 1 and are grouped into 5 easy Reading Stages.

Reading Stage 1
Consonant - Vowel - Consonant.
(21 phonemes)
Reading Stage 2
Consonant blends – Initial
( 4 phonemes)
Reading Stage 3
Consonant blends - Final.
1 phoneme)
Reading Stage 4
‘ar’ - ‘or’ - ‘er’
( 3 phoneme)
Reading Stage 5
Two Syllables closed
( 0 phoneme)

 

These reading stages are practiced and reinforced by playing the card games and then learning how to read is reinforced using a multi-sensory approach which is:

Trugs therefore follows specific aspects of the DCSF Core Criteria as recommendations for a highly structured systematic phonic resource. For a full and detailed explanation visit: www.standards.dfes.gov.uk/phonics/programmes/publishers/readsuccessfullyltd

Anyone wanting to ask Joanna about the phonics in more detail can contact her at

Boxes 2 and 3 are ready for production and are anticipated for sale at the end of 2008.