What is phonics?
In recent years, the way we teach reading in English schools has changed a lot. This change is helping many children learn to read and spell better. Phonics is now the first strategy children are taught to help them learn to read. It works together with other teaching methods like Guided Reading and Shared Reading to help children develop all the skills they need for reading and hopefully make them really enjoy reading.<br>
What exactly is phonics?
Words are made up of small sounds called phonemes. Phonics teaches children to listen carefully and identify these sounds in words. This helps children learn to read words and spell them correctly.
In phonics lessons, children learn three main things:
- They learn , about grapheme phoneme correspondences. This means they learn all the sounds in English and how to write them down. They learn these sounds in a certain order. The first sounds they learn are short vowels for Spanish-speaking children, focusing on s, a, t, and p.
- Blending Children learn to blend sounds together to make words. This is when they say the sounds in a word and then put them together to hear the whole word. This skill is very important for learning to read.
- Segmenting They also learn to segment words, which is the opposite of blending. They say a word and then break it into the sounds that make it up. This helps them learn to spell words.
What makes phonics tricky?
In some languages, learning phonics is easy because each sound has just one way of writing it down. English is a bit more complicated. Even though English has only about 44 sounds, there are about 120 different ways to write them. Some sounds are made with more than one letter, like ch, th, oo, and ay.
There are also sounds that can be written in different ways. For example, ch makes different sounds in words like chip, school, and chef.
Why learn phonics?
Some people used to say there was no point teaching phonics because English is so tricky. But now, most people agree that because English is tricky, it’s even more important to teach phonics clearly and step by step. Phonics is like learning a code to read and write. Children start with the easy parts and then move on to the harder parts.
How is phonics taught?
In terms of how phonics is taught, there is no need to worry that it is being taught to children too early. However, if you were to observe a phonics lesson, you may be surprised. Phonics lessons are brimming with fun games, songs, and actions, and they only last about 15-20 minutes each day. In my experience, when phonics is taught properly, children usually enjoy it so much that they ask to play phonics games at other times during the day.
