The first and foremost thing to remember when teaching phonics is that children need to know what sound each letter makes within a word. It is important not to add the ‘uh’ vowel sound to the letter (e.g. saying ‘suh’ instead of ‘s’) as many people, myself included, have been told that letters make these sounds when they were in school. We learned to read despite this, but learning just the sound makes it much easier to learn to blend letter sounds to read words and also to identify the 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 kinesthetically (associating learning with movement). Most commercial phonics teaching schemes incorporate all three forms to help most children with their preferred learning style. There is usually a picture that incorporates the letter that children learn to recognize and relate to the sound of the letter, a song that includes the sound of the letters, and a movement or action that children do while saying the sound of the letter. lyrics.
The second important thing is that it is less confusing for the child at first if you concentrate on teaching only the sound of the letter, and not its name (/a/ and not ‘ay’). This way they are not trying to learn two things at once. Learning the names of the letters can come later when they have a good understanding of the letters and the sounds they make by singing an alphabet song.
Third, letters are usually taught lowercase first, not uppercase. This is because in most books and texts children will be reading, and for their writing, most letters are lowercase.
There are free resources available on various sites to help you teach phonics, although getting a full range of activities for all the letter sounds can take a lot of browsing. For those of you with a lot of time on your hands, it’s worth looking around.
Different schemes suggest different rates of learning. The UK government in its ‘Letters and Sounds’ document suggests learning around 4 letters or phonemes each week, starting at around age 5. At the school where I teach, we cover only 1 letter sound each week as most of the children are learning English. as an additional language and therefore should also focus on developing vocabulary and comprehension.
At the end of the day, it’s not so important how quickly or slowly your child learns letter sounds. 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 worry too much about and is usually not an indication of how well they will read or do in school in the future. When they are ready, sooner or later they will learn all the letter sounds and begin to read and write. Having helped teach your child to read is an achievement that you can finally feel proud of.
