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.
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