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.

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.

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.

The  Limits of Phonics

As a teacher of children learning to read using phonics and the other methods I still hear a lot of people saying, “I never learnt phonics and I learnt to read no problem.” or “Books based on sight words are so repetitive and boring.” “Real books are the only ones children enjoy, I really hate ***** reading scheme, it doesn’t feel like real language.”

The problem with all of these statements is that usually the people saying them are parents who can already read and who are rejecting one particular method of teaching reading to their children. It could be that the way they learnt to read does not suit their child and they need to learn in a different way, or simply that by teaching all of the skills used in reading, their child would learn to read more quickly and easily. Learning to read online or offline requires a mixture of approaches.

Reliance on a Single Method for Teaching Reading

If we rely on teaching only one aspect such as phonics, this is very limiting. If we only teach children how to blend letters to read the words, they will only be able to read words which are spelled phonetically, and as there are so many different phonemes written in so many ways, it will be a good while before the children will be able to read more complex words. This limits their reading to books from schemes based entirely on phonics, which do not have natural sounding language and are often limited in content and interest due to the limit of words which can be read using phonics at any one stage. The advantage is that we are at least raising their phonemic awareness.

If we only teach sight words and reject phonics, we are limiting the children to reading only those words that have been learnt (either taught or picked up through reading). This either means reading books with a very limited vocabulary which are often repetitive and boring, or risking the children getting frustrated because when they come to a word they haven’t learnt, they do not know how to start to work out what it could be.

The Usefulness Of Reading Schemes

This is the problem with rejecting reading schemes altogether : most ‘real’ books have such a wide range of rich vocabulary that beginner readers get frustrated at not being able to read for themselves. Just because you use a scheme doesn’t mean that real books don’t have a place; hopefully you’ll be doing much more reading than simply the scheme anyway. Your bedtime story could be a ‘real’ book and you can read this to your child without expecting them to read anything, or read a ‘real’ book during the day only asking your child to read certain words or sentences which you know they will be able to. It is still important to read to your child and to really enjoy stories and books without any expectations or pressure on them. These books can be full of beautiful, natural, descriptive language and rich vocabulary which children need. When your child reaches a good level of reading, they can read ‘real’ books by themselves, with fluency, understanding and without getting frustrated at having to stop and ask what this word says all the time! And one last point – children can find almost any book interesting if approached in the right way by the person reading with them. If you show your boredom, your child will be bored too! If you talk about the story and pictures, relate them to things the child understands and is interested in, make funny comments etc. it will make almost any book fun to read with you!

The Blend For Learning to Read

If we didn’t teach phonics, or didn’t teach sight words, some children would pick them up naturally from reading and being told what unknown words say. However some would take an awful lot longer to work out for themselves the complex system that is our written language, and some may never fully reach that level of understanding on their own. In my opinion, teaching children how to use all the cues or clues (phonics, sight words, pictures, context, knowledge of grammar and what makes sense or not) to help them read is the safest, quickest and most sensible approach.