What is phonics?  

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This is what the Government says:

Phonics is a way of teaching children to read quickly and skilfully.  They are taught how to: 

• recognise the sounds that each individual letter makes; 

• identify the sounds that different combinations of letters make - such as ‘sh’ or ‘oo’; and 

• blend these sounds together from left to right to make a word.  

Children can then use this knowledge to ‘de-code’ new words that they hear or see.  This is the first important step in learning to read.   

You can read more from the Government's basic guide to phonics here.

My child sometimes mentions phonemes and graphemes.  What are they?

a phoneme is a single sound e.g. the word 'cat' can be separated into three phonemes 'c-a-t'.

a grapheme is how a sound is written down e.g. a letter or a small group of letters.  The word 'cat' is made of of three graphemes, all of which are one letter: 'c-a-t'.  The word 'light' is also made of three graphemes, but not all of them are just one letter: 'l-igh-t'.  In 'light' we teach children the grapheme 'igh' which is the same phoneme as the 'i_e' in 'kite' and the 'y' in 'by'.  This is quite a developed skill!  Early phonics teaching focuses on one letter, one sound!

So how can I help my child with phonics?

Use the same phonemes (sounds) that the children are being taught at school when reading together.  Here are some helpful video clips showing a teacher sounding out the 44 phonemes (separated into vowel sounds and consonant sounds).  The letters and letter groups on the screen are just one representation of the sound, as one phoneme can be written using many graphemes (see above).  Click the links below to download.  The videos play in Windows Media Player or other multimedia player software.

phonemes vowel sounds.avi   phonemes consonant sounds.avi

Talk to your child about when sounding out words is useful: in school, we refer to 'tricky words' like the, no, go, I, said etc because they can't be decoded using phonics.  When reading a book together, help you child to say and gradually learn on sight tricky words which can't be sounded out or which don't follow normal spelling rules.

Is phonics the only way to help my child to read?

While the ability to blend sounds together to work out how to read a word is important, it is inefficient for children to attempt to blend all the sounds in every word; recognising whole words speeds up reading, as does combining the first letter of a word with looking at the picture.

Here is an example of a repetitive reading book used in the early stages of learning to read.  The pattern of 'We like walking' appears on every page, reducing the number of new words the child needs to read.

On the page above, the child can look at the picture and the first letter of beach to know what the word is; they do not need to sound out the whole word.

The same applies on this page, where the first letter of woods together with the picture will be enough information for the child to know that the word is woods (it couldn't be forest, or it would start with f!).