Watch UK school teacher Mr Thorne and YouTube sensation Geraldine the Giraffe take you on a learning journey through the world of phonics, grammar, spelling and punctuation, learning letters and sounds along the way.
Structure and features
For students and families
Phonics is about recognising letters and knowing how they sound. You can use this YouTube channel to reinforce phonics learning at home and as a way to engage your child. The videos are organised into different areas for students who are learning to read and write, and include:
- Geraldine the Giraffe – phonics flash cards
- Mr Thorne does phonics – teaching the digraphs and trigraphs of the English alphabetic code
- Mr Thorne does phonics – alphabet series
- Mr Thorne does phonics – letters and sounds
- Geraldine the Giraffe – season 2
- Mr Thorne's blog – tips, ideas and thoughts from Mr Thorne does phonics
- Mr Thorne does phonics – alternative sounds and spellings
- Reading check – videos to check your phonic blending and decoding ability.
For teachers
You can search for videos that correspond to the teaching sequence of phonics and current learning focus, and share these with families to use with their students at home.
Teacher notes
Curriculum links
English – Language strand
Sub-strands:
- phonological and phonemic awareness of the ability to identify the discrete sounds in speech (phonemes), and to reproduce and manipulate them orally
- alphabet and phonic knowledge – the relationship between sounds and letters (graphemes) and how these are combined when reading and writing
- spelling knowledge – how sounds (phonemes) of words are represented by letters or letter patterns, knowledge of meaning units within words (morphemes) and word origins.
