It is a fact: not all children find it easy to hear the individual sounds we make as we talk. Does this mean that phonics is not a good way to teach these children to read? Not at all. It simply means, that the teacher must find a way to help the child to hear the sounds. There are only a very, very, few children for whom phonics does not work. But there are many more teachers who will give up too quickly as they lack the expertise to help these children.
I know of a child who went through the Reception class. She learnt all of the letter sounds and her mother and teacher both thought that she knew her initial sounds. She could even match some pictures to their initial sound (she had learnt to match them by heart). But then the teacher tried to teach her to put the sounds together to make words. Nothing happened. The child was confused.
When I checked, the child had not been taught to apply her knowledge. She knew the sounds, but did not know how to hear the first sound in a word. It seemed that she was doing well - until she was asked to put the sounds together and it was a meaningless task for her.
If you are a parent of a child for whom the phonics programme you are using does not seem to be working, or a teacher with a child who is not making progress, please do this simple thing. Check that the child can give you the initial sound for any of these words. Say the word and ask:
What sound does this word start with. Listen carefully, I'll say it slowly: ___________. mouse zip cotton goat lamp nail van button yellow desk hair mop star wash leg ant egg ink on tick horse banana finger job plate up
If the child hesitates, or makes mistakes then s/he is not ready to move on. More work needs to be done with initial sounds.
For some children it might just mean that you need to spend more time making sure that they actually understand that these are sounds we use when we speak and that they are at the beginning of words. You can use ourgames to help you. Tell your pupil that when we speak we use sounds. Words are sounds put together to make words. Each word is made up of sounds put together. First we need to learn to hear the first sound in a word.
Other children may need just that little bit more help. A more multi-sensory approach may help. We can help these children to 'feel' the sounds as they say them. Sounds are made by the position of the lips, tongue and teeth and the breath. For each sound (except the vowels) the use of these three differs slightly. By helping children to become aware of their mouth (lips, tongue and breath), we can help them to learn the initial sounds and hear those sounds as we say words.
Video to help children struggling to hear initial sounds
It is easier for me to teach you what to do with a video. Listen and see how I help a child to 'feel' sounds, as a means by which to help them 'hear' them.
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What do children need to know before learning to read?
On this website, we only advise teaching your child to read by using a systematic phonics programme. Although there is much talk of 'reading readiness', in order for a child to learn to read with phonics, all that is necessary is that a child can match letters.
I suggest starting to teach a child to read as early as you can. If your child can match letter shapes, then try to teach the initial sounds. Many children are able to do this by the age of two, if not earlier. If you perceive your child is not yet ready, wait a bit longer and try again. Some children lack maturity, but it will soon come.
Things your child does not need in order to begin reading
Other things to do to help children enjoy reading
Although little is required in order to teach a child to read, more is needed if a child is to grow to love reading. When a child is surrounded by people who read a lot, who talk about what they have read, is read lots of books, and is given stimulating experiences, then that child is more likely to see reading as a purposeful activity and be more willing to learn.
Read lots of books yourself and to your child
If a child grows up in an environment where the adults read, for different purposes, the child will learn that reading is a purposful activity and will want to read for him/herself.
Make reading a plesaurable acitvity that you both enjoy. Read often to your child. Find books that promote good moral values in children and are beautiful to look at and listen to. Avoid the crude and ugly titles that seem to proliferate in libraries and book stores - many of which are linked to TV programmes. There are plenty of lovely books that you can enjoy with your child. Build a library for your children in your hown homeEncourage your child to play
Play is essential to a child's mental and physical development. Play stimulates the brain and encourages further learning. It is also a child's means of learning about the world.
Children do not play so much these days, as their time is taken up with technological devices and electronic games, or filled with entertaining activites. These are not as valuable as imaginary play through which children learn about the real world and the language associated with it.
No-one is ever too old to learn, but we can stifle the love of learning. Our modern technological world does just that. But it does not need to be this way! Parents hold the key to unlock a world of adventure and knowledge for their children.
Encourage children to play and act out their experiences in their play instead of watching screens. Children will play happily into their teens if the technology is removed. Their games become all absorbing and grow with them, with teens re-enacting battles they’ve learnt about in history for example and all the time learning to make sense of the world – skills they will need as adults. They will grow out of play naturally when the time comes.
Play needn’t be expensive. Some of the simplest toys give maximum play potential. An old cardboard box can become many things – a ship, a dolls house, a cooker, etc…children will more than happily ‘pretend’. In fact – don’t buy lots of plastic for them – as that too will stop them using their imagination. The more ‘pretend’ the better. Avoid toys (and books) linked to Media - Star Wars, Peppa Pig etc. as these are marketing ploys and restrict children's imagination to what they have seen on the screen. Rather buy/make dolls and dolls houses, Playmobil (wonderful for real world play), wooden train sets, vehicles, puzzles... all the old fashioned toys that have stood the test of time. Obviously, as we have already seen, learning to read means recognising shapes of letters. Therefore, shape matching activites and puzzles are good toys to develop readiness for reading in very young babies. Talk to your children
This might seem a strange thing to say, but its actually very easy to go through the day and then realise that you have not communicated much to your children - other than commands and instructions.
If a child is to understand what s/he is reading, then the words that are read must be meaningful. Phonics is powerful. Children will be able to sound out and read many words - even words they do not understand. In order for the child to then make good progress in reading in the early years, the child must have been introduced to a wide vocaulary, or progress will be stunted as the child will not be able to enjoy reading. Every activity has its own vocabulary. The advice here is to take an active interest in your child and enjoy doing things together. Hopefully you will talk with your children as you enjoy time together. Bake, go to the park, scoot, bike, swim, go for lots of muddy puddle walks in the woods/park (dress in waterproofs - I loved these - and there won’t be so many dirty clothes to wash) - boys especially need lots of time outdoors with space - but girls love and need it too ... running, jumping, seeing what their bodies can do now, testing themselves, giving themselves challenges. These are all very important for growing up. Use your eyes, point things out. Don’t be afraid to be ignorant, just look and talk and question. What’s this? Why that? Look things up on the internet when you get home if you have no other reference books. See our nature website for ideas as to how to introduce your young child to the natural world. Develop concentration skills
In order to learn, children need to be able to concentrate and focus on a task - especially for learning to read.
I know it is very tempting to have the television on all the time for background noise, or to stick the young ones in front of the DVD while you cook tea and use media as a baby-sitter - I've done it myself - but do try and limit how often you do it. Try and turn the televeision off for most of the time. When you do allow a DVD, put on one that you know your children can sit and watch through (i.e. not too long so that the children lose concentration and wander off). If possible, sit and watch it with your children so you can talk about what's happening. Your aim is to teach them that they sit and watch what is in front of them - not just learn to ignore it - or they will have a hard job learning how to sit and listen to a teacher. Keep the sessions short - then switch it off at the end. The role of Technology in the teaching of reading
It is thought by many that electronic programmes and apps can be useful in the teaching of reading. I am wary of them and advise against using them. Apart from the fact that apps and games are addictive and it would not be good to train young children to be addicted to them at a young age, they try to make the process of learning to read look 'easy'.
Learning to read is not easy. It requires the utmost concentration and many hours of practice to become a good reader. Many apps teach reading with jingly tunes. Reading real books does not come with jingly entertaining tunes! So if you teach children to read with jingly tunes, then reading books will be very tame by comparison! Be careful what you train your child's brain to like as it will be very difficult to train him/her off it later and you might regret what you have done when s/he doesn't want to learn. Technology can have a good place in our lives but we all need self control to keep it in it's place. Model that to your child. In addition to this, all true learning must take place from books. The internet is great, but it is not a source or reliable information. In days gone by it took a lot of money to publish material, and although not so good things were published, on the whole they were of a more noble quality. Books that said untrue things by and large did not sell and so there was no profit to be made from them. By contrast, anyone can publish anything on the internet - and make a profit, and you need a degreee in every subject to be able to discern fact from opinion and discern what is true and what is not. Error abounds in these days when right is wrong and wrong is right. Therefore, aim that your child will learn to read from real books and the best way of doing this is to teach your child to read using physical books. There is another reason to limit the use of technology when educating your children, be it teaching them to read or leaning maths, and that is that pictures flicking across a screen take no effort to watch and no brain power to think about. When the child is then expected to sit and learn, learning is hard work and children would prefer not to have to think - as it is hard work! Train your child to learn to think early on! Conclusion
Doing these things will help your child to become a successful reader, who not only CAN read, but enjoys reading as well.
It is absolutely essential that reading be taught by phonics and not by the so-called "look-say" methods currently in vogue in the public schools. If the child is not taught to read correctly, then the entire school program which follows will be so difficult that the child will have a very great disadvantage.
How often do we stop to consider what a wonderful skill to acquire is the ability to speak. The facility to communicate with each other in a complex yet straightforward manner from an early age is surely chief among proofs of our exceptional origins. None other of God's creatures have this gift, but mankind is made in the image of God so that there can be communication between us and our Creator. That places speech on a very high level.
Not only can we speak, but we are able to write down what we say so that other people can 'hear' our words in our absence. We call that 'reading' and the acquisition of this skill provides the gateway into every kind of learning and understanding. It ought to be easy to learn to speak and to read. Babies soon begin to copy the speech sounds they hear around them, especially as parents or siblings help them to discern which sounds are most important. Learning to read can begin at that stage too as very young children imitate those specific speech sounds which are the building blocks of written language.
Our facial features have been cleverly designed to influence our vocal chords and voice. When we speak we use the lips, tongue, teeth and throats and nose to shape the sounds we utter. Spoken words are these sounds uttered in sequence. We do it without thinking about it, but teaching reading means thinking about these sounds. Let us give them their official name: they are called phonemes. Thinking about them carefully and learning the symbols (or letters) which stand for those phonemes is the beginning of reading.
Altogether, when we speak we utter 44 phonemes: 26 of these are easily learnt as pupils learn to match the letters of the alphabet to objects that begin with that sound, 'a' for 'apple', 'b' for 'ball', etc. saying the sound the letter stands for, not it's name. Eventually pupils learn that the phonemes 'a', 'e', 'i', 'o', 'u' as they are used in some words, stand for the name of the letter and not it's sound: gate, here, ride, home, tune, for example. Later they will discover that more new phonemes are made when 2 or 3 letters work together. Five of these new sounds are made with two consonants, 'sh', 'ch', 'th', 'ck', 'ng'. Boat, girl and book are examples of vowel sounds and vowel consonant combinations. All of these phonemes are dealt with individually and this website will help you to know how to go about blending them into words. There are only 44 phonemes, but they can be represented by many more combinations of letters. This means simply that sometimes there is more than one way of expressing the same phoneme in writing. The 'ai' sound looks different in 'rain', 'play', 'eight' and 'plate'. So learning these phonemes is a bit like learning to unlock a code. Rather than having to learn lots of individual words by heart, we teach children the code and then they can unlock many words, even if they have never seen them before. This is why a good phonic system is empowering.
The speed at which 44 phonemes, and the combinations of ways to make them are learnt depends of course on the pupil's ability, but also on the patience and commitment of the teacher (or parent) and the systematic and regular teaching of the programme. We cannot over emphasise the importance of those things. Also, above all, the teacher must beware of 'going through the motions', just doing the job, without understanding what needs to be done and how important is this task.
Therefore, although the main teaching session each day is short, the careful teacher will be constantly looking for opportunities to apply the lessons to their students daily activities. This will ensure maximum progress. An easy to use, FREE phonics reading and spelling programme
To make it easy for you to teach your child to read AND spell with phonics, we have written our own simple systematic (each tiny step builds carefully ont he one before), phonics reading and spelling programme: Reading Made Simple.
What can you expect from the Reading Made Simple programme?
Amazing things. Two year olds reading. The whole of Peter and Jane finished by age 5 if not sooner - which in case you don't know would enable the reader to pick up the Authorised Version of the Bible and pretty much be able to read any passage from it. That's the age most children are when they start to learn their alphabet sounds! Most phonics programmes teach either reading or spelling. We aim to teach both. We take one tiny step at a time and build the next step carefully onto it, building success, often where others have failed. Not all phonics programmes are equal. Don't be put off if your child has speech problems. A phonic programme fits well with speech therapy. Teach your child to read as s/he learns to talk. My son was able to finish Peter and Jane by six and a half, having only started talking aged 3 and half with a couple of words. He could read better than he spoke, but his reading then brought his speaking on. FAQ The phonic language (phonemes, graphemes, digraphs etc...) is so complicated - do the children need to know it? No - and nor do you! It only complicates what should be simple. I deliberately refer to them all simply as 'sounds'. Little children (unless they become graduate linguists) will not need to remember this vocabulary - it serves no purpose in the process of learning to read and spell. Can all children learn with phonics? There are a very few children/adults who can not hear the phonic sounds. I repeat - a very few. In most cases of phonics failing, it is due to the teaching method/the teacher's lack of experience, not the fault of phonics per se. Phonics works with all children regardless, when taught well, as even those very few who do not hear the sounds, benefit from a good phonic programme teaching reading and spelling in a sctructured way, grouping patterns of words together (e.g: rain, pain, Spain, snail etc..) One of the main pitfalls I see that causes many children to supposedly 'fail' with phonics, is not spending enough time ensuring the child can blend (put the sounds together to make a word - c..a..t.. cat), and segment (isolate the sounds in a word cat: c..a..t..). Ensuring the pupil is competent in these two skills will ensue success, Do not rush over these stages. What's wrong with 'look and say' methods? Some children seem to start well with whole words methods but come unstuck later when they meet more and more words they have never seen before and have no plan for working out what they say. Or they come unstuck with spelling. Added to which, when your child is young you may not know that they have a difficulty such as dyslexia - which can be overcome as far as reading and spelling is concerned with a synthetic phonic approach. Better to teach phonics from the start and eliminate years of anguish. Conclusion:
To me as a teacher and then later as a parent, it has been of paramount importance that my pupils read well - not a second best programme that fails them as they reach higher levels. It has also been important to me that they spell well. Schools in general have very low standards - they are trying to teach towards tests, rather than with a long term view of an adult who is fully literate to an excellent level. They are working with multiple pupils and time is a huge constraint. Let's set a new standard We don't want to be proud, but we do want excellence. Choose your reading and spelling programme well - it matters more than any other subject in the early years. A child who can read can teach themselves anything! In fact, spend most of your formal schooling time in KS1 focusing almost exclusively on the 3 R's - Reading, writing and 'rithmetic. This is the time to lay a solid foundation. The rest of their schooling hangs on mastery of these fundamental skills. Get this right and the rest falls more easily in to place.
Find out more about phonics here: A simple guide to understanding phonics
I thoroughly reccommend the two books I have advertised in this post, if you would seriously like to know why phonics is the best method to teach reading and spelling. Research from the University of Bristol is suggesting that phonics, as a means of teaching reading, is of no more effect than other methods, such as whole word methods. Professor Jeffrey Bowers, from the University of Bristol, has said that despite "widespread consensus in the research community" that the reading method (phonics) is preferable to meaning-based approaches, there is a lack of "empirical evidence" to suggest that it leads to better outcomes. Is this correct? Should we just throw phonics out and let teachers once more have free choice? I believe that your answer will depend on what you mean by 'works'. If you want way to make sure that your child learns to both read and spell to a high standard, to read and write challenging material, then yes, phonics works. If you want to raise a child for the modern, entertainment driven culture where the need to be able to read is minimalised - then use whichever method you like. Remember though, that although many accuse the reading method debate of being hijacked by political parties, it always will be. Reading is political and history tells us why. If you can keep people illiterate, then they can be easily deceived: they cannot read to discover the truth. I am not a university lecturer, or a politician, just a plain, simple, practitioner with over 30 years experience of teaching phonics. However, if my knowledge of university lecturers is right, they usually have very little practical experience of teaching, tending to be rather insulated and divorced from real life. In addition, I have learnt through experience that in many disciplines in life - be it medicine, education or the like, 'evidence' is not to be trusted. Statistics are fine as far they go, but the 'results' are very dependent on the interpretation of those statistics and a thorough knowledge of the factors considered in their collection, as all research is limited. My own personal experience tells me that I would not want to stop teaching phonics. I will tell you why. My Background I was trained in the late 80's/early 90's, when natural language methods were the vogue. Our lecturers shared their delight in the work of such as Marie Clay, and declared this to be the NEW way forward. We students were filled with hope and enthusiasm. I spent many hours on the phone to my mother, an infant school teacher in the heart of London, in a very deprived area, extolling the virtues of the NEW way and decrying her old fashioned methods of look and say flashcards. She had been taught in the 50's when 'look and say' had been heralded as the NEW method and phonics (though not very well understood and not always well taught) was on the way out, having held sway in the 40's. She too had become disillusioned with 'Look and Say', finding that it went so far, but not far enough as the child's capacity for memorising new words was eventually exhausted. She was at the stage of wondering why the older teacher in the room next door when she first started teaching, had better success. She now knows that the method this teacher was using - one that had not been introduced to my mother's cohort of students - was the phonics method. All that my mother remembers, is that the infant children in the class next door were reading and writing to a high standard, while she struggled to teach these subjects. BUT, because she had been taught the NEW methods, the staff were (foolishly) keen to learn from HER! However, she instinctively knew that the method I was acclaiming was not the solution. Whole Language Methods Marie Clay has been heralded for her work with reading recovery. She studied how children who learned to read easily learnt, and tried to apply that to help those who were struggling. The term 'emergent readers and writers' developed around this time - meaning that the skill was in the child, and all that had to happen was that a way should be found to help it 'emerge'. It resulted in children desperately struggling to 'read' and being rewarded for their ability to guess, though it wasn't put like that. It was called using 'skills'. It involved managing to ’read’ the text by looking at the pictures and using context and meaning. At no time, was any method introduced to the child to enable him/her to know for sure that s/he has said the right word. Similarly in writing, children were left to find their own way to write, which in practice resulted in classes of seven year olds filling pages with 'writing' that was undecipherable, and being rewarded for 'writing'. Maybe this is not what Marie Clay meant by her method, but it was sure the way it was put into practice at ground level, by inexperienced teachers. Any nay-sayers were dismissed. Clay was a psychologist and her mantra was 'it's all in the child' and that is what drove her work. Supposing she is wrong and it is not all in the child? What then? Putting theory into practice In college it sounded good. Until I was faced with a class of inner London children in 1991 and the Oxford Reading Tree Biff, Chip and Kipper books, and I realised that our utopic ideas were of no use. I had to use the scheme provided by the school and I had had no training in its use. Furthermore, the children in my charge had little literary experience before entering school. I was starting from rock-bottom - in year 1. My children had only started school in the preceding term. I tried - I honestly did. I wanted to make whole language methods work. I was convinced it was the right way. After one term I had to admit defeat. Yes, a few children were learning to read, but I was concerned about the rest - especially those whom I had quickly recognised as being potential remedial cases. These children were simply play reading: looking at the pictures and guessing what the text said. Sometimes they got it right, but in my mind this was not reading and I could not see how these children were ever going to make the necessary quantam leap into readership. Thankfully, the pressure for results was not as keen in those days as it is now, but I still felt acutely embarrassed by my lack of progress. Being young, I did not stop to think about asking the other teachers. I realised later, that had I have done so, I would not have found any better success. The Junior department had long given up hope of the infant children reaching their doors able to read. I expected chidlren to be able to read, whatever was put in front of them, whether there were pictures attached or not. Was that too much to ask? Later I learnt that some children learn to read despite the method being used: they find structure for themselves - but often cannot explain it - but you can see them applying it as they read. A solution I desperately looked for help and scoured the ads in the TES - a newspaper in those days. I found the advert for a phonics spelling scheme - a very simple approach that I could understand - no complicated language to learn. I began. The programme presumed that the children would know the sounds of the letters of the alphabet. I didn't know them myself. We learnt together. The children loved chanting 'AY says 'a', Bee say 'b' adding a new sound each day. And then the wonder as we started to build cvc words (though we didn't worry about calling them that). The children were so proud of their achievement. Better still I had parents of children with older siblings coming to me saying, 'What are you doing? My child is reading better than his older brother/sister,' or others new to the school 'He didn't get taught to read in his last school - this is amazing, he's making so much progress. ' The success was not just in reading - by the end of Year 1, these children, who had started at rock-bottom, were writing an A4 page of readable writing. The phonics programme had given them confidence to write - they enjoyed writing and they were blossoming. Meanwhile the head was ecstatic and decreed that phonics be used across the school. I was still young and rather bewildered, as I genuinely though that you sent your children to school to learn to read and yet - here were parents expressing surprise that I was teaching them to read! It is only with age that I have learnt the reasons why. Meanwhile, my mother had been sacked for trying to teach her class in inner London: she gave too much direction and she should have been letting the skills emerge. The result: 60 children in one classroom - aged 7, playing with sand and water all day with no direction from the teacher. This was the age of chronic teaching failure: thousands of children were used as guinea pigs for an experiment that failed them. Something had to change. These children are now in their 30's - an age group in which so many, I am finding, do not like to read, or consider themselves deficit in this area. These adults are now the parents of our primary children. The phonics battle Thankfully, while I was only just discovering phonics, others like Mona McNee, who had devised a phonic system of her own as schools had failed her Down’s Syndrome son, were busy campaigning for it to be brought back into schools. They faced a long hard battle and were very unpopular. Whole language experts accused them of just teaching 'decoding' without teaching meaning. For me, I found that as we decoded, we made sense of what we read. I didn't expect the children to decode words that were not in their vocabulary - not for a long time, at least. The children were delighted that they could read and it made sense to them. The decoding was a means to an end: as a word became familiar, it seemed to become a 'look and say' word and, over time, with a good reading scheme with a limited vocabulary, more and more words fell into this category. BUT, when they met a word they had not met before they did not have to guess - they had a sure-fire method of working it out - by themselves - without a picture to help. This must be reading. What good is context if you do not know what the individual words say? Does Phonics work? It depends what you are looking for. For me - it does the job perfectly. I have always found that where phonics fails, it is because the teacher has not studied the learner and matched the way of using phonics to the child. There are many ways of teaching with phonics - not all of them are helpful. Find a method that works, and make it work. Know your children inside out - individually - and tailor the method to the child - not the child to the method. Having taught children from Reception, right through to GCSE and beyond, and I can see the evidence. Children taught well by phonics leave the competition standing. The secret is in that little word ‘well’! Other posts you might like: How to teach phonics effectively How to: get the best from Letters and Sounds How to: help your Y1 class pass the phonics test |
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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