Is your child struggling to read fluently or are you trying to teach a young child to blend and having trouble? Maybe your child has been taught the letter sounds and maybe even many letter combinations (e.g. ai, igh, ee etc...) and you cannot understand why your child cannot read well.
Why is my child doing these things? In short, your child, even if s/he has been taught phonics, is not blending, but guessing. This means that whoever taught your child phonics did not ensure that the child was hearing and feeling sounds in words to the point where s/he could easily sound out words to spell them: c-a-t, AND put them back together again to read them: c-a-t- = CAT. Other typical signs that this is the case include:
What is blending? Blending is the word we use to describe the putting of sounds together to make words. For example, a child may sound out a word: d-i-g. The child then needs to be able to hear that when we hear d-i-g it is the word DIG. Some children, for various reasons, do not do this automatically, as others might. This leads the child to learn words by heart and then, if s/he sees a word with similar letter patterns, s/he will presume that it is the same word, and rather than check the sounds in the word, will guess. It also has to be borne in mind that this is a two -way process and a child may be able to do it one way (most often to spell), but not the other (most often to read). If the parent sees a child sounding out accurately for spelling words such as BUS and CUT, then s/he can be forgiven for thinking that the child must also be able to sound out such words to read them. However, this again is not automatically the case. In my work with pupils who are struggling to read I often find that one is easier than the other, at least initially. Do not be too hard on yourself, if you taught your child to read - it is a mistake that even many teachers make. See below for the remedy. I thought guessing was a reading strategy Sadly, some teachers have mislead parents to believe that looking at pictures and guessing what the text says under the picture, is a way to learn to read. Sadly, the opposite is true: guessing is an enemy to learning to read. Although phonics is taught in UK schools, sometimes a child is given reading books that do not contain words that a child can decode. This can lead a child to guess and some teachers may not notice what is happening until the habit has been formed. How can I help my child? If your child is just learning to read for the first time - understand the pitfalls of teaching a child to read; understand that once a child knows all of the letter sounds and can hear the beginning sound of words, then the child must now learn to hear sounds in words and take them apart to spell (we call this segmenting words) and put them back together again to read (what we call blending). This stage may take much time and much patience be needed. It is helpful if teachers/parents a child's ear to hear sounds in words, before introducing the child to written words as otherwise a child may memorise the words before learning the skill. If you have an older child who has already memorised small words, like CAT and BUG then again, start with pictures, and then use nonsense words first orally and later to decode. This pack of 3 FREE to download Oral Blending Activities may help you. They are based on hearing sounds, but not seeing words. Here are three simple activities that you can do with either a younger or an older child. They are both listening activities, so the child will not be expected to spell or read the words. With just a little time spent each day, doing these activities, your child will hopefully soon be hearing sounds in words - separating them out as if to spell and putting them back together ready to sound out text.. The secret is to keep practising and to have a lot of patience. One day it will happen. Once the child can blend, see Reading Made Simple, my 100% FREE systematic Phonic Programme to teach reading, spelling and writing. For a small price you can check your child's progress at this level with my Phonic Diagnostic Assessment tool kit. This will help you to detect where your child is having difficulties. It may be individual letter sounds that are weak, or blending words such as MAT and TUB, or those with consonant blends such as FROG and MILK. Once the weakness has been identified you can begin work to remedy the situation. When our children first begin to learn to read we may take care to use phonics. Maybe your child's school uses phonics. Phonics is the proven, best method to teach all children to read and spell well. So your child starts to learn by phonics and you expect all to be well. For some, that is the end of the story. The child does well, learns to read fluently and the parent thinks no more about it. For others, the tale is some what different. Their child fails to make progress. They are told "Maybe s/he is late starter". "Don't worry, it will come!" Precious time passes and still the child cannot read. "What is wrong with my child?" Thinks the parent, and starts to have big concerns. For those children at school, the misery increases. The teacher does not seem to know how to help. The curriculum says the teacher must move on and the child has to go too - and while others can read the questions and the books, for those that cannot, there is little help. They fall behind in all subjects and their time at school is pretty much wasted. By the time the child reaches secondary school, s/he is often disillusioned and may have given up wanting to read, long before. What can a parent in these circumstances do, or do to prevent the case getting worse than it already is? Help is at hand. Reading Made Simple has been written just for such children and the good news is that it is 100% free. You can become your child's teacher and with a road map in front of you, and some guidance, and some determination to succeed, you can help your child, without needing to spend lots of money. Should I get a dyslexia assessment? These are very expensive to do privately and will only get a label without necessarily the help to go with it. A school may provide your child with a dyslexia friendly keyboard, headset and audio equipment, but if s/he cannot read, this may be of little help. If you suspect that your child may have symptoms of dyslexia, you can ask the school to pay for an assessment, though such an assessment is hard to get now. The Government's latest advice is that as the schools teach phonics, all children's needs should now be catered for - even those with potential dyslexia and that the school will provide what is necessary. The other problem is that there are many children needing help and there is probably going to be a long wait for help which may mean more time is wasted. You can help your child NOW. As a teacher of children who need help with reading and the author of Reading Made Simple, I work with such children. As part of my work , I have devised a series of simple tests that you can use to find out where to start your child on Reading Made Simple. This will make it easier for you to pin-point precisely where your child is having difficulties. Having identified the difficulties you can take action to help your child to learn the necessary skills, through the information contained, for FREE, on the website. The test assesses a child's ability to recognise the letter sounds and then to put them together and pull them apart to read and spell words such as cat, do, and frog. This may seem very simplistic, but experience shows me, time and time, again that a child struggling to make progress in reading or spelling has got left behind somewhere at this stage and is then relying on guess work. Many programmes tell the teacher which days to teach which lesson. Sadly not all children fall into this structure. Some needed more time on a skill and didn't get it. The programme moved on and the child was left with a handicap which then holds them back from their true potential. I have produced this simple test to find that place where your child got left behind
This kit is like having me there to assess your child. Your child need not even know it is a test. The instructions are easy to follow and the results easy to interpret and all the information you need is included in the Diagnostic Phonic Assessment Tool Kit. If you do the test and then have trouble interpreting it, despite the guidance, please contact me. Reading Made Simple is easy to use and as many parents say, it is so easy that you could be forgiven for thinking that your child is not learning until you see the progress that has been made. It structures the learning process so carefully so that all can succeed, given support from a parent who has read the programme and has followed it closely. Success* is built into the programme. Your child need not fail any longer! There are many resources, also for FREE, that you can use if they are helpful. *Reading Made Simple has helped many children of varying degrees of difficulty, from profound to no known difficulties, to learn to read successfully, however I cannot guarantee success as there are too many factors outside of my control. The programme is simple, but because it is so simple, every component of the programme is essential - none can be missed out. Please do read the teaching notes carefully. There are many resources, also for FREE, that you can use if they are helpful. Reading Made Simple. 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.
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Inspire your chillren to write about spring, with our bright, colourful, Spring Word mat.
Why I like word mats
When I am asking my KS1 or special needs children to write on a topic, they often need words appropriate to the topic to help them with their spelling. Of course, being able to spell a word quickly helps the children to write more fluently and therefore to convey their thoughts more precisely.
How much better it is when teachers point out the spelling patterns in the new vocabulary! I will use every opportunity to point out the sounds in new words that the children have already learnt (or are perhaps struggling with, for a bit of extra practice! In the old days, before computers made printing in colour so easy, I had to resort to writing the words on the blackboard, drawing little pictures beside them so that I was not constantly being asked 'What's that word Miss?", or "Which word says -----?". But now I can give each couple of children or so a Spring Word mat each and writing becomes so much easier, freeing me to be able to give more support where it is needed. Three benefits of phonetically coded word mats
I find that phonetically coded word mats help children to see the phonic sounds in the words they use. This has three outcomes:
1) The children learn to spell new words quicker when they recognise the sounds they have already been taught in words they have not used before. 2) The spelling patterns they have already been taught are reinforced as they use the word mat. 3) The children are delighted to see that that many of the 'new' words, are words that they can sound out for themselves - when the sounds are highlighted for them! This is a tremendous confidence booster! Word mats for teachers, class room assistants and parents
Word mats are for everyone who works with young children, or those with special needs.
Great for classroom assistants to use Having the words phonitically coded helps classroom assistants to key into the phonic structure of the words as they help the children. However - a warning - it is never advisable to give the weaker children to a classroom assistant. These children need the teacher's skill to help them - and the teacher needs to know exactly how the child copes with the activity in order to identify strengths and weaknesses to plan further work.. This is information that can only be gained by watching as the child completes the activity. Great for parents Parents can help to support their child by giving more practice of ideas that the children have already been taught in class. Word mats can be laminated and make meal times fun, or be displayed where the child will see it regularly. Ask questions with the Spring Word Mat Here are some activities to use the mat for; 1. Point to the ------. 2. Show me where it says -----. 3. What are baby frogs called? 4. What are frog's eggs called? 5. Where do bird's lay their eggs? 6. What are baby birds called? 7. What are baby sheep called?
Have you seen our Autumn and Summer Word Mats?
We hope this colourful Spring Word Mat will be of use to you and to your children!
Download by clicking on the image.
If you like our Spring Word Mat - please tell others!
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A spring phonics game to help children
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A first reader that your child can read for him/her self once this game has been played
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Make sure your pupil has been introduced to the necessary phonics sounds before playing this game
My Spring Phonics Game is suggested for those readers who have completed Stage 7 of Reading Made Simple.
So that you can work out if this Spring Phonics Game is appropriate for your child, I have listed the words contained in the game, with their phonics sounds marked, below:
nest
eggs frog bud blossom catkins |
Tulip
Crocus Daffodil |
chicks
Bluebells Primrose frogspawn tadpole |
flowers
butterfly |
The Spring Phonics Game...
and easy to play - like all of our games!
Click the picture to download!
If you like our games, please tell us and your friends!
If something is wrong, tell us before you tell your friends!
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
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
Welcome
Hello, 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.
Reading Made Simple (a completely free systematic phonic reading programme) and Sound-it-out are the results!
I aim to bring advice and resources aimed at enabling parents and teachers to EASILY teach phonics effectively. That is: to help children become life-long readers, forming a bedrock on which all further education can be built. My mother helps to draw the pictures and between us we have many years experience of teaching KS1, special needs and ESL. We hope you enjoy browsing our site!
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