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What is Phase 1 phonics?

Phase 1 phonics is the first stage of the phonics teaching programme. At this stage, the focus is primarily on developing speaking and listening skills. Speaking and listening are an important set of literacy skills that will create the foundation to a lot of your children's further learning. Listening requires the fundamental skill of focusing attention on the speaker to be able to hear and understand what the speaker is saying. Speaking skills require students to take turns, speak confidently, stay on topic and speak with clarity.

Phase 1 phonics also lays the foundation for further Phase 2 stages.

Phase 1 phonics skills that are developed at this stage include:

• Environmental sounds
• Instrumental sounds
• Body percussion (e.g. clapping and stamping)
• Rhythm and rhyme
• Alliteration
• Voice sounds
• Oral blending and segmenting (e.g. hearing that d-o-g makes ‘dog’)

Examples of Phase 1 Phonics

Phase 1 phonics in the DfE Letters and Sounds document is broken down into seven different aspects:

• Aspect 1 - Environmental Sound Discrimination
• Aspect 2 - Instrumental Sound Discrimination
• Aspect 3 - Body Percussion Sound Discrimination
• Aspect 4 - Rhythm and Rhyme
• Aspect 5 - Alliteration
• Aspect 6 - Voice Sounds
• Aspect 7 - Oral Blending and Segmenting

The purpose of these different aspects is to develop students’ language abilities in the following ways:

• Learning to listen attentively
• Enlarging their vocabulary
• Speaking confidently to adults and other children
• Discriminating between different phonemes
• Reproducing audibly the phonemes they hear

Using sound-talk to segment words into phonemesThe purpose of these different aspects is to develop students’ language abilities in the following ways:

• Learning to listen attentively
• Enlarging their vocabulary
• Speaking confidently to adults and other children
• Discriminating between different phonemes
• Reproducing audibly the phonemes they hear
• Using sound-talk to segment words into phonemes