The first and most important thing to remember when teaching phonics is that children need to know what sound each letter makes within a word. It is important not to add the ‘uh’ vowel sound to the letter (for example, say ‘suh’ instead of ‘s’), as many people, including myself, have been told that letters make these sounds. when they were in school. We learned to read despite this, but learning just the sound makes it much easier to learn to blend letter sounds to read words and also to identify the sounds in words to write them.

Children learn in different ways, but the three main ways are auditory (learning by hearing things), visually (seeing things), and kinesthetically (relating learning to movement). Most commercial phonics teaching schemes incorporate all three forms to help most children with their preferred learning style. Usually, there is a picture that incorporates the letter that children learn to recognize and associate with the letter sound, a song that includes the letter sound, and a movement or action that children do while saying the letter sound. letter.

The second important thing is that at first it is less confusing for the child if you focus on teaching only the sound of the letter, and not its name (/a/ and not ‘ay’). This way they are not trying to learn two things at once. Learning the names of the letters can come later when they have a good understanding of the letters and the sounds they make by singing an alphabet song.

Third, letters are often first taught in lower case, not upper case. This is because in most books and texts children will be reading, and for their writing, most letters are lowercase.

There are free resources available on a number of sites to help you teach phonics, although getting a full range of activities for all letter sounds can require a great deal of browsing. For those of you with a lot of time on your hands, it’s worth looking around.

Different schemes suggest different rates of learning. The UK government in their ‘Letters and Sounds’ document suggests learning about 4 letters or phonemes each week, starting at about age 5. At the school where I teach, we cover only the 1 letter sound each week, since most of the children are learning English. as an additional language and therefore should also focus on developing vocabulary and comprehension.

At the end of the day, it’s not so important how quickly or slowly your child learns the sounds of the letters. Some children will be able to learn 4 per week or more, and others will struggle to learn 1 per week. This is not something to worry too much about and is usually not an indication of how well they will read or do in school in the future. When they are ready, sooner or later they will learn all the letter sounds and begin to read and write. Having helped teach your child to read is an achievement you can ultimately be proud of.