Today we will look generally at things to bear in mind however you are teaching phonics to help you to teach more effectively.From my many years of teaching synthetic systematic phonics, having developed my own programme - Reading Made Simple, which incidentally teaches both spelling and reading, well, together, and having experience of Letters and Sound, I bring these practical suggestions which I hope will be helpful to some. A phonic programme is only as good as the teacher using itIn other words, in order to get the best results from ANY programme, you must have got 'inside' it as it were, understand the process that your children will go through, and be able to support them through it - as opposed to just delivering what is in front of you to deliver. In the cases where I hear a teacher saying 'S/he can't learn by phonics!' in most cases I see clearly that the fault has not been with the child, but with the teacher. Don't be one of them. Make it a mindset to want to make phonics work for every child. There is only a very small percentage of folks who cannot hear phonetic sounds - it is rare. These children however will still learn best with a structured approach.
Having said this - some programmes are better than others: on the whole the simpler it is to administer and understand, the more success you will have with it. No teacher has time to get to grips with a complicated method and use it consistently well without much expensive training. Phonics does not need a lot of training, only a willingness to embrace it and see the benefits. You will learn best with your children. A few tips along the way can help though. One third of your class will learn by any methodRealise that about one third of your class will learn by any method or none. Do not base your assessment of your class on these children. Look to the lower two thirds - particularly the lower third. These are the children that will be most helped by phonics teaching. Phonics gets all children reading! Do not think of the lower third as remedial - they are not! Don't let them become so. Make it your responsibility to do all that you can to help them to read well. By the way - the lower third are not necessarily the least able - history testifies that some extremely bright people were late readers! Among this group may well be dyslexic children, yet to be identified. Good phonics teaching is the best way to teach these children and actually to minimize the effects of the dyslexia on the child's future ability to read and spell - it can almost be eliminated. I hear of too many cases where a teacher lets these children 'drop through the net' as it were and say to the parent 'Don't worry! S/he'll catch up!' These children are not for the remedial class - they can be taught by you. They will be in the remedial class by Y3 if you do not do your job properly! The games and worksheets on this site have mainly been developed through working with such pupils. Do not rely on parental helpParental help is wonderful and to be encouraged but no child should be disadvantaged because of a lack of parental help. It is your responsibility to make sure that every child can read and spell to the best of their ability. By all means send reinforcement activities home - but they should be just that - reinforcement - and you should NOT expect parents to help with them. In this way you will not be disappointed and the child not disadvantaged. The sending home is purely to encourage the parent to help, not as a valid part of the child's education. Never send home work/activities that the parent may have to help with - unless you have carefully explained what the parent should do to the parent before hand, otherwise the parent may inadvertently and well intentionally confuse the child. The best use I have ever made of 'homework' is to send home a book the child has already read well to me, to celebrate success - the child wanted to share it with the parents. You might guess, but homework and young children is something that I feel quite strongly against. Again - I sent home spellings - but only because it was school policy. I sent home a list of words with the sound we were working on, in the hope that some may get a bit of extra practice - but in all honesty it was usually the children in the top two thirds that benefited from this practice. Be careful what you send home. Have regular parents meetings to keep them informed - but don't let any child be disadvantaged if mum/dad can't come because they are working, or do not understand. Learn initial sounds and letter formation together Understand the learning processLearning is never forward in a straight line - and this is so of phonics, for both reading and spelling. If you have ever learnt a language for yourself as an adult (unless you are a 'language' person), you will know that as a new piece of information is introduced, just for a while, some of what you thought you knew becomes uncertain as you learn the new rule and how to apply it. This is evident in phonic teaching, when for example you teach that powerful 'e' changes a vowel to say it's name; you will soon see that children are putting 'e's' everywhere, until you have repeated the idea several times and helped them to see that all the words with a short vowel sound do not need an 'e'. I call this 'wobbling'. Learn to expect it - and not panic and think the children have gone backwards. Continue to move steadily forwards, giving lots of support. The upper third will grasp the new concept quite quickly, so devote your energies to the lower two thirds and especially the lower third. It will take them a lot longer and they will need a lot more support. These groups particularly respond well to the games on this website. Worksheets have a place, but sometimes a bit of light relief helps to 'oil the wheels' as my mother always said. Learn how best to cope with differing ability levels This is one of the biggest problems. We all love to have the child that can already read proficiently age 5, but how to meet that child's needs while teaching the others children in the class is not always easy - you risk making them feel different, set aside doing different work during the phonic time. The last thing we want is for any child to get bored through lack of challenge. How you cope with this will differ from school to school. Some split children into phonic groups from year 1. I have operated this way myself in the past. I offer this suggestion: Make sure that you, the class teacher, teach the lower group in your class. The upper third that learn by any method will thrive being taught by someone else. The lower groups need the continuity - you, the class teacher, with them all the time. It is absolutely crucial that you know exactly where these children are in their phonic development. Phonic teaching should not just take place for half an hour each day and then be forgotten. The diligent teacher will know each child inside out. If an opportunity arises during another lesson to reinforce the bit the child is struggling with, then the teacher can use it to 'plug' the gap. This constant revision and reinforcement it vital to the success of these children. Sometimes it will be a group of children that you know are struggling with a particular sound, or you have been trying to help a group learn a new 'tricky' word. In the geography session, later that day, you meet a word with that sound, or that tricky word. do not think to yourself 'This is geography not phonics!' Young children learn holistically, not in discreet subjects, so just take a second or two to briefly point it out to the child/children, before moving back to geography. Use a truly phonetic reading schemeBetter to not give the children books to send home at all, than give them ones that work against what you are doing. So many school fall down on this one point and I do appreciate that actually there are very few schemes that use phonics properly. Most will encourage whole word recognition and using 'context' (a nice way of saying 'guesssing'!). Contrary to popular thought, the Oxford Reading Tree scheme, despite its appearance of being phonetic, is still fundamentally a whole language reading scheme that has been given a phonics veneer. If you look at the early books in the scheme closely, you can see that there is still close matching of the text to the pictures. This is supposedly to help the child to use cues to ‘read’ but actually, for most children just encourages guessing, which is a pernicious habit that is very hard to break, especially for the lesser ability children, who often become those in need of remedial help. Having worked with many ‘remedial’ children (who most would never have become remedial had they have had phonics well taught from the start). I know it is a popular scheme, but it does not help your phonics teaching as you will end up expecting children to read words for which they have not yet been taught the skills to decode - or resorting to look and say - or worse still, guessing. My best advice - write your own! Mine do not fit with Letters and sounds, but rather with my own programme Reading Made Simple - however they show how simple the books could be. See them here. Today's parents may feel illiterate due to the poor educational standards in the 90'sThese were days when teachers were trained in increasingly progressive methods which included 'whole language' methods of teaching reading (see my post here for more information on this) - which have been proved many times to fail many children. Most schools had progressive reading schemes, like the Oxford Reading Tree books. Many parents at the time thought that their child had 'problems' because they didn't learn to read. Dyslexia clinics country wide were flooded with anxious parents - who in the end were told 'There is nothing wrong with your child, they just haven't learnt to read!' who knows how many of the present parents of KS1 children feel inept when it comes to reading and spelling - it is known to me that many are acutely aware of their own deficiencies. Be aware of this - you could make a real difference by teaching the parents along with the children. Comments are closed.
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WelcomeHello, I'm Lilibette, qualified teacher (B.Ed Hons). I have taught phonics in mainstream education, followed by have home-educated my two sons to 18, and am now a private tutor. Categories
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