🔤Early Start Phonics (FYP)

Almost every reading difficulty later on traces back to one thing: a child who cannot reliably hear the separate sounds inside a spoken word. Early Start Phonics fixes that before a pencil ever touches paper. The first four weeks contain no letters at all — just listening games you can play in the car, in the bath and at the supermarket.

Once your child can pick out first sounds confidently, letters arrive in the order Oxford's synthetic phonics sequence uses, so the very first four sounds already spell real words. Children read 'sat' and 'tap' in week five and the whole thing starts to feel like a game they are winning.

What your child will be able to do

By the end of this course, a learner working at the expected pace will be able to:

• Hear and say the initial sound in any spoken word
• Recognise all 26 letter shapes and their most common sound
• Blend two- and three-sound words out loud (c-a-t → cat)
• Hold a pencil with a tripod grip and trace letter families
• Sit and listen to a story for eight to ten minutes

How the course is structured

Early Start Phonics (FYP) is organised into 4 units covering 60 lessons in total, designed to run across 20 weeks at roughly 2 hours a week. The unit outline below shows 60 representative lessons.

Listening before letters

• Sound walk: ears on
• Kitchen sounds
• Body percussion
• Loud and quiet
• Animal voices
• Same or different
• Rhyme time: cat
• Rhyme time: hen
• Silly rhyme soup
• Clap your name
• Clap the groceries
• First sound: sss snake
• First sound: mmm moon
• Odd one out: first sounds
• Mix: listen, rhyme, clap

The first sixteen sounds

• s — snake sound
• a — apple sound
• t — tap sound
• p — pig sound
• s, a, t, p — our first words
• i — insect sound
• n — nest sound
• m — moon sound
• d — dog sound
• Blend sit, pin, man
• g — goat sound
• o — orange sound
• c — cat sound
• k and ck — kite and sock
• e, u, r — egg, umbrella, rainbow

Blending out loud

• Two-sound words: at
• Two-sound words: in, up
• Robot talking: stretch then squash
• Three-sound words: sat
• Three-sound words: pin, tap
• Picture match: cat, dog, sun
• Blend on the go
• Sound buttons
• Read a word, find the picture
• First tiny book: Sam sat
• Tiny book: a tap
• I spy with sounds
• Blend then say
• Parent check: six words
• Blend party

Pencil control and letter formation

• Big shapes: circles
• Lines and zig-zags
• Tripod grip
• Letter family: curly c
• Curly letters: a and d
• Curly letters: g and o
• Straight letters: l and t
• Straight letters: i and f
• Down-up letters: n and m
• Writing s
• Writing a
• Writing t and p
• My name: first letter
• My name: all of it
• Show-off folder

How it is taught

Three- and four-year-olds learn in short, frequent bursts, so every lesson is capped at about eight minutes on screen followed by an off-screen activity. Nothing is auto-advanced; you decide when to repeat a session, and repetition is expected rather than treated as failure.

What is included

• 60 short illustrated lessons (about 8 minutes)
• Colourful picture cards for every sound
• A parent script and an off-screen play for each sitting
• 12 tick-box progress checks built into the sequence

Who this course suits

This course sits in the FYP track and follows a oxford-aligned sequence. It suits families who want a complete, sequenced english year rather than a set of loose practice activities, and it assumes no teaching experience — every lesson includes a short method note for the adult. If your child is comfortably ahead or behind the beginner level described here, use the placement check in lesson one and start at the recommended point instead of lesson one.