Crick Software blog

Joanne Gibbins

Phonics fun with Clicker

26th October 2021

Our Decodable Stories on LearningGrids for Clicker are perfect for early learners starting out on systematic phonic work. They build on children’s knowledge of the major grapheme-phoneme correspondences and the skills of blending phonemes through a word to read it.

The stories and supporting activities focus on reinforcement and application of synthetic knowledge and skills in reading and writing contexts. The carefully levelled activities provide opportunities for children to apply their phonic knowledge across a range of recording, reading and writing activities to help build their confidence and develop a level of automaticity in using phonemes and graphemes.

The stories and activities are presented within cumulative letter groups. This means that children can work at appropriate levels and progress through the groups as their confidence with an increasing range of phonemes and graphemes grows. It also means that children can move incrementally from simple to more complex phonic work, and teachers can introduce the phonemes in discrete daily phonics sessions.

phonics

For each letter group, there is a Clicker Book (including a Read It Yourself version), a Sentence, Connect and Talk Set. The text is based on phonically decodable text and common exception words and includes the phonemes/graphemes appropriate for the level – the target phonemes/graphemes for the letter group as well as cumulative phonemes/graphemes from earlier groups.

These letter groups are organised as follows:

  1. s, a, t, p, i, n

  2. c/k, e, h, r, m, d (+ cumulative phonemes/graphemes from earlier groups)

  3. g, o, u, l, f, b (+ cumulative phonemes/graphemes from earlier groups)

  4. ai, j, or, oa, ie, ee (+ cumulative phonemes/graphemes from earlier groups)

  5. z, w, v, ng, long/short oo (+ cumulative phonemes/graphemes from earlier groups)

  6. y, x, ch, sh, hard/soft th (+ cumulative phonemes/graphemes from earlier groups)

  7. qu, ou, oi, ue, er, ar, ear, air (+ cumulative phonemes/graphemes from earlier groups)

All of these beautifully-illustrated stories and activities are available now on LearningGrids. We are continuing to work on additional activities to support early synthetic phonics work. These will include Matching and Speaking/Listening activities that introduce and focus on the major grapheme-phoneme correspondences (within the phoneme groups), enabling children to learn new letters and sounds then practise grapheme-phoneme correspondences. Watch this space!

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