In the next post you will see more about our online reading course. In order to use our free phonics worksheets correctly, a major part of the course, you need to download some fonts onto your computer. If you sign up to the newsletter to receive the free phonics worksheets you will be told how to use them. But if you are thinking of signing up you should also download them just in case. They are also very useful for producing your own worksheets at home as these are the fonts that look most like the handwriting that children are taught to use.

Anyway you can download the attached files here. When you click on them they will invite you to save onto your computer. Do it into your fonts folder but sign up for the newsletter (Which will pop up on leaving the site) for more info of what to do with them;

National Primary Font The first standard font we use.

National First Font The second standard font we use.

National First Font Dotted This is the dotted font you will use with your child when writing the letters.

Do you want to receive free phonics worksheets and ideas for games and activities to make learning phonics a fun and enjoyable experience for you and your child? When you teach your child to read the best resources are invaluable. Please sign up to our site on the popup when you leave the site (or send us an email to lynne@teachyourchildtoread.net if you have popups blocked and we will send you an invite) and you will receive songs, actions, phonics worksheets produced by us, ideas for games and activities and links to other phonics resources and sites which we have handpicked.

Our first programme covers all 26 letters of the alphabet and their principal phonemes, and you will be sent access to all the resources you need for one letter each week. Sign up now to start your fun journey to reading and writing straight away.

The fonts can be downloaded here

Related Reading

1) Phonics Reading Plans

I have now prepared the first part of our teach your child to read online course. We will be uploading all of this first course with the 26 letter phonics classes into the autoresponder for you to subscribe to and follow. We are alos developing a course which will be available at the end of this first course covering the remaining 18 phonemes  and another one for the sight words. The autoresponder and invitation to sign up for the free course will appear on the site in the next few days.

I am recommending one letter per week in the non-alphabetical order described in the phonics section of the site, and have included many different activities to do with each letter so you can take your child from the most basic level of understanding up to decoding simple phonetic words and phrases in no time at all. I have scoured the web for the best resources over the years as a teacher and parent, and will also include links to relevant and useful resources taking the pain out of the search and allowing you to concentrate your efforts on teaching your child to read doing what really works.

Meanwhile, if you feel your child is ready for a faster pace of learning the letter sounds and want to get the whole course upfront rather than waiting on a week by week basis, then we will be making it available for you in that way too. To register an interest simply send an email to lynne@teachyourchildtoread.net and we will mail you when it is up and ready and give you details of how to get it.

I hope the theory I have explained in the other pages here will help you understand how you can help at home and inspire you to take the first positive step to helping your child get a head start in the fun and rewarding process of learning to read.

The first and most important thing to remember when teaching phonics is that children need to know what sound each letter makes within a word. It is important that we don’t add on the ‘uh’ sound of the vowel to the letter (e.g. saying ’suh’ instead of ’s’), as a lot of people, myself included, were told that the letters made these sounds when they were at school. We learned to read despite this, but learning only the sound makes it a lot easier to learn to blend letter sounds together to read words, and also identify sounds in words to write them.

Children learn in different ways but the three main ways are auditory (learning by hearing things), visually (by seeing things) and kinaesthetically (by relating learning to movement). Most commercial phonics teaching schemes have all three ways incorporated into them to help more children with their preferred style of learning. There is usually a picture incorporating the letter which the children learn to recognize and link the letter sound to, a song which includes the letters sound and a movement or action which the children make whilst saying the letter sound.

The second important thing is that at first it is less confusing for the child if you concentrate on only teaching the letter sound, and not its name (/a/ and not ‘ay’). This way they are not trying to learn two things at once. Learning the letter names can come later when they have a good understanding of the letters and the sounds they make, by singing an alphabet song.

Thirdly, it is normal to teach lowercase letters rather than capitals. The reason for this is that in the majority of books that children read, and even in their writing, most letters are not capitals.

Free resources are available on many sites to help to teach phonics though it can take a lot of surfing to get a full range of activities for all of the letter sounds. It can be worth looking round for those with lots of free time.

Different schemes suggest that rates of learning will differ. The British government in its document on ‘Letters and Sounds’ suggests learning around 4 letter sounds or phonemes every week from aged 5 onwards. In my school we do one letter sound per week as most children are learning English as non native speakers and must concentrate on the building of understanding and vocabulary.

Really, it isn’t too important whether your child learns the letter sounds quickly or slowly. Some children will be able to learn 4 a week or more, and others will struggle to learn 1 a week. This is not something to be overly concerned about and is usually not an indication of how well they will read or perform in school in the future. When they are ready, they will eventually learn all the letter sounds sooner or later and start to read and write. Having helped to teach your child to read is an achievement that in the end you can be proud of.

Other useful Reading

• WFMW- Backwards Edition – As you can see if you read through this blog, we are new to homeschooling. We are also thrilled to be homeschooling and finding it to be much more condusive to our lives. And with a little help from TutorVista and lady, we get by. …
• Most Advanced Learn To Read Phonics Program Makes Learning Fun … – ClickN’ READ Phonics is an Interactive learning to read program where children demonstrate learned skills. Your child enjoys the challenge of responding correctly to move forward within a lesson and the program patiently re-teaches until the correct response is learned. Your child experiences the joy of self achievement using a learning to read program where answers are learned and not just given away by the program.

Developing Phonemic Awareness in Children

Before you even start to teach your child to read you need to get them to be aware of the sounds that are around them at all times and to differentiate between sounds. This development of phonemic awareness is very important and there are many ways to do this. We have already pointed out some activities to develop phonemic awareness in this post. Now here is the second part of that, there is one more part to come.

•    Hide a doll or toy in the garden or house and tell the child they must ‘rescue’ it. Guide them towards where it is hidden by humming or singing louder as they get nearer and quieter as they get further away from the hiding place.

•    Record or download different environmental sounds such as animal noises, sounds from the city (cars, trains…) etc. and play a game where the children have to listen carefully and identify the sound they hear. You could make a lotto game where they have to match the sound to its picture or alternatively buy a commercially produced one such as Living & Learning – Soundtracks or Smartkids Animal and Nature Sound Lotto

•    Sing action songs encouraging your child to perform a range of different actions in time with the rhythm or the beat of the song. Sing songs extra slowly then extra fast or quietly then loudly. The BBC has a good page for this and another can be found here

•    Learn nursery rhymes or other songs with rhyming words and play at singing them, missing the second rhyming word for you child to fill in.

•    Clap, march, jump, skip etc. to the beat of their favourite songs.

More to come in the next post on phonemic awareness games but try these out. Not only are you teaching your child to develop phonemic awareness by doing them but you also have a lot of fun so don’t take them too seriously.

Related Articles / Extra reading

h t t p : / / n e w t e a c h e r r e s o u r c e c e n t e r . c o m / ? p = 1 7 6 4

For the second part of our sight words games and activities we have another six activities that will help your child to read while still having fun. All of these activities can be used along with the other sight words activities in the previous post to give a great variety in your teaching of the sight words.

•    Play the Pirate and Treasure game: make paper or card ‘gold coins’ with the words on and put them in a special ‘treasure chest’. Take one coin out and put it so the child can see it. If they read and say the word out loud correctly, they win the coin and add it to their pile of treasure. If not, the parent or person playing the game wins the coin back, puts it back into the treasure chest (saying the word aloud) and chooses another coin to put on the table.
•    Put large cards with the words written on them on the floor. You have to throw a pebble or counter or whatever you can find to land on one of the words. If it lands on one you can read the word out loud and win the card. Take it in turns and see who wins the most cards.
•    Make sight words bingo or lotto games.
•    Write sight words on large pieces of pasta such as macaroni with a permanent marker. Put them in a pan and your child has to scoop one out with a spoon and read it. If they can, they put it in their dish and if not they put it back in the pan for another time.
•    Print out or write the sight words in a large font and in outline. The children can make play dough or plasticine ‘snakes’ to go over the letters to write the word in dough.
•    Make a sheet with various shapes and a sight word written inside each shape. Make sure you write each sight word more than once. The children have to colour the matching sight words the same colour.

Teaching Phonemes. – Helping to Teach Your Child to Read

When you are looking to help to teach your child to read you should teach the phonemes in a certain order.

Most phonics schemes introduce the phonemes or letter sounds not in alphabetical order, but in the order in which more simple words can be read or written as soon as the first few have been learnt. The order varies only slightly according to which scheme you choose. This is an example which you could use at home.

s, a, t,  p,  i,  n,  c,  k,  e,  h,  r,  m,  d,  g,  o,  u,  l,  f,  b,  j,  v,  w,  x,  y,  z,  qu

Then the following phonemes made by two or more letters are taught:

sh, ch, th (2 sounds as in ‘thing’ and ‘the’), ng, ai, ee, igh, oa, oo (two sounds as in ‘too’ and ‘look’), ar, or, ur, ow, oi, ear, air, ure, er, ay, ou, ie, ea, oy, ir, ue, aw, wh, ph, ew, oe, au, a-e (as in ‘make’), e-e (as in ‘these’), i-e (as in ‘like’), o-e (as in ‘home’), u-e (as in ‘tune’).

The order you teach them in is not so important in the end, but if you start with the first, most common phonemes, it means that the children can start to apply their new knowledge, reading simple words a lot sooner, which in turn motivates them to learn more as they can see they are starting to read and get excited about it.