Children first learn the names of letters in an orderly sequence, then the sounds that the letters represent, and finally two or three-letter combinations such as ‘sh’, ‘ch’ and ‘oo’.
Thereafter children, who have had an introduction to letters and how they sound, start learning about the rules of phonic fusion that tell them how sounds blend together to make whole words.
An effective way to teach reading through phonics is by introducing some engaging activities and educational games. It could be an online game for reading, organizing sentences or ELA games for kids. Or, it could be fun online school phonics games, songs, worksheets for kids, or short stories for kids to read. Some of the approaches that teachers can apply while teaching phonics to kids are:
Synthetic Phonics: Where the child learns to ‘blend’ the different letter sounds together, eg c, a, t to form the word cat. Blending different sounds together to make a word gives kids confidence that they can work out what words say.
It’s about learning all the rules of the English language – the etymology, the structure of words – and the rote learning of how to go about it; how you can read English if you don’t have any sense of what you’re reading, if you decode and encode and learn all your phonemes and graphemes, you crack it!
Analytic Phonics: Children are taught to break words into individual sounds (‘p’-‘e’-‘n’, in the case of ‘pen’), and this is accompanied by an introduction to short vowels, long vowels and silent e.
Once students have whole‑word images and computations entrenched, for them to learn whole words by parts would be something else, a through-the-backdoor extension of piecemeal learning. Rather than having the word whole, they study a book and guess by inference what a word can mean. The girl then starts to get a clue to the context of the word, without knowing the inner grammar of why the word is so used – a clue by guessing at word patterns and at rhyme, by analogy, and so on.
Analogy-Based Phonics: Children learn how to use patterns of words with similar sound-symbol correspondences (seek-speak-weak) and the roots and affixes that connect them (subs-submerged, absurdness, mathematical) to decode unknown words.
Thus ‘cab’, ‘dab’ and ‘jab’ all end with the same pattern of sounds, which helps young learners of the language see the patterns of how the letters make the sound they do.
Remembering these key factors will help you become an amazing phonics instructor, parent, or teacher. Good luck and have fun!
Comments