At Panania North Public School our teachers implement a high quality explicit and systematic approach to phonics to ensure our students have a solid foundation for effective reading and spelling.
Please watch our parent and student videos, in the learning from home resources, for extra information on each unit of learning and for students to consolidate and practise concepts being taught at school.
We follow the synthetic phonics teaching sequence from the Get Reading Right program.
What are phonemes?
Phonemes are the smallest unit of sound in a word. Our video Pronouncing the phonemes explicitly teaches how to pronounce each of the 44 phonemes correctly.
What are graphemes?
Graphemes are letters and letter combinations we use to write and represent the phonemes. There are many different graphemes and we use these as our spelling choices. Our video, what are graphemes? gives an explanation of the types of graphemes and why they are important for effective spelling.
What are camera words?
Camera words can also be called ‘tricky’ or ‘irregular, high frequency words’. These are the words which children may find difficult to read and spell. They are words that cannot be easily decoded (sounded out) at this level of the children’s learning. They are called Camera Words to remind children they must use their visual memory by taking a picture in their mind of the tricky part that cannot be easily decoded.