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.