Does reading seem like a battle with your child? It could be because they don’t understand phonics. This makes it incredibly difficult to enjoy reading or be motivated to complete reading assignments. Phonics has been a hot topic in the world of reading. Many adults know how to use phonics but don’t realize it. Unfortunately, in the early 2000s, schools moved away from phonics to push context and inference-based reading methods without realizing that phonics is a crucial component of literacy education.
By definition, it is “the system of relationships between sounds and their corresponding symbols.” This means being able to “sound words out” because the reader is familiar with what the sounds look like and how to pronounce them to put words together. This method is typically introduced during a child’s early developmental years to provide a solid foundation for reading and writing skills. However, when schools started to phase it out, education researchers started to notice a huge literacy gap in younger generations of readers.
If your child isn’t reading with phonics but is reading using memorization and pictures instead, then this post is for you. If you’ve heard the term “phonics” or “decoding” tossed around, and you are interested in figuring out what it all means, this is also for you. This comprehensive guide will delve into the importance of phonics, its benefits, teaching techniques, and much more.
What is Phonics and Phonemic Awareness
Phonics is a highly effective tool for teaching children to read. It involves teaching children the sounds associated with sounds and their spellings. Specifically, phonics promotes understanding or “phonemic awareness” that letters and groups of letters have corresponding sounds. By breaking words down into their individual sounds or phonemes, also known as “decoding,” children will systematically improve their reading comprehension. Phonics encourages the development of these skills systematically and logically, making it a fundamental part of any successful reading curriculum.
How to tell if your child is reading with phonics
A “phonemic” reader understands their letters and letter combinations, which allows them to decode words and sound out unfamiliar words…without looking at the pictures. When a child is reading with phonics, they start with a basic understanding of simple letter sounds, such as ‘m’ for ‘man’, and then move on to more complex letter combinations, such as ‘sh’ for ‘she’.
You can tell if a child is a phonemic reader if they:
- Pause at unfamiliar words to break them down into chunk
- Stop at “hard words” to decode them (sound them out) instead of guessing the word.
- Can read accurately without using pictures
Phonics Teaching and Interventions
If your child isn’t reading with phonemic awareness, there are several things you can do to support them.
- Visual cues like pictures and posters can help them remember the letter sounds more easily. The key here is memorizing sounds, not words.
- Repetition is key when learning phonics, so reviewing letter sounds often with your children is important.
- Fun phonics games and activities are a great way to make learning phonics fun and engaging for students.
- Incorporating phonics into other subjects, such as spelling and writing, can help children to understand the concepts better.
- You can make flashcards of the letter sounds they are working on
- Create phonics challenges by splitting or “segmenting” large words into smaller sounds.
By combining these strategies, you can ensure that your child is learning phonics effectively and enjoyably.
Combining Phonics Reading with Writing
Phonics instruction is an important building block of literacy that can help children learn to read, spell, and write. Before checking in with your child about comprehension, you should have a quick conversation about the phonics used in the words in the text to promote strong reading and writing skills. To do that, when a child is learning new vocabulary, make sure they write and sound out the vocabulary word by segmenting it.
Let’s take the word “segment” as an example:
1. Start with the whole word: Segment
2. Break it down into “chunks” or letter and sound blends ie: /s/ /eg/ /ment/
3. Have the child decode each sound (the more intervention they need, the more you break the word up)
4. Have the child write out each sound
5. Then review the definition
Other engaging activities such as word sorts, suffix and prefix activities, and word building should also be used to reinforce phonics instruction. This process takes a lot of patience but allows for a better understanding of the word’s pronunciation and helps beginners recognize the word in future readings. Overall, you want to ensure you are segmenting the word and helping the child learn the sounds. Instead of telling a child what a word is, teach them how to sound it out.
Sight Words and Sight Vocabulary
Sight words are a key component of reading that often gets mixed up in phonics development for children. A sight word is a word that is recognized by sight without having to use phonics.
Common Sight words are:
- The
- This
- I
- Me
- and
- was
Sight words are a collection of words a child can recognize instead of sounding out because they don’t follow typical blend rules. (EX: “was” is pronounced like “wuz” but that isn’t how we spell it). Sight words are important to an extent, but I often see parents (and some teachers) push this memorization on words that should be decoded instead of memorized. It is important to review sight words regularly to ensure that the child can recognize them quickly and accurately. However, parents should realize that 80% of words are decodable.
So whether you’re raising a beginner reader or a reader reading on a first-grade or kindergarten level, decoding skills should be prioritized over memorization.
The Reading Wars – Phonics Vs. Balanced Literacy
The Reading Wars is a long-standing debate between proponents of phonics-based instruction and supporters of balanced literacy. Common curriculum writers, like Lucy Calkins, have pushed the idea that balanced literacy should be prioritized over phonics-based instruction for years. This ultimately led to many students learning to read by making inferences and learning words using pictures instead of decoding them. This approach stifled the reader by turning reading into a guessing game instead of a phonological science. Because children were not reading with letter-sound strategies, they could not decode words as they got more complex.
This guessing game of reading created a huge learning gap, and students’ reading comprehension levels continued to decline. Susan B. Neuman, who was the Assistant Secretary for Elementary and Secondary School Education, advised George W. Bush to stop using the balanced literacy method because it was “‘woefully inadequate’ and unsupported by research”
If you don’t know if your child is reading using phonics or this balanced literacy method, check the section above. The good news is, that it’s never too late to learn how to read with phonics, even if your child has learning or development disabilities. Many of our students have diverse learning disabilities and still improve their reading and phonics levels because, at The Innovative Learners, we maximize our phonics teaching and phonics games and provide our students with high-quality phonics-trained reading teachers.
How Does Phonemic Awareness Aid In Reading and Spelling?
Phonics is an essential tool for readers who struggle with spelling. By breaking down the sounds of a language into smaller units, phonics helps to identify the phonemes (sounds) that makeup words and to match them to letters or groups of letters. This makes it easier for students to recognize patterns in words and recall how to spell them. Readers who spell better understand letter sounds meaning, they have better phonemic awareness. Once students understand the structure of words and how they are spelled, it is easier for them to learn new words. So, in order to develop a stronger speller, readers need to have an understanding of language through phonics.
Watch Phonics Teaching in Action
Hopefully, after reading this, you understand phonics and how it relates to your child. However, some are visual learners instead. I’ve uploaded a video below that shows you how we used our phonics and decoding methods to help a child increase their reading level. Witness his growth here!
Getting More Support
There is a lot of power in the community. Parents with children behind or struggling with reading tend to feel guilty; some even feel like they failed their children. I want to empower you by letting you know you aren’t alone. I provide many resources to parents in my Facebook group here, where many parents seek help and utilize my resources.
Time Efficient way of Teaching your child Phonics
After reading this, I hope you understand that teaching phonics is a science, and it takes an extreme amount of patience. Many parents struggle with this and it feels like a battle to teach their child to read. The most effective solution to this is to hire a tutor who is trained in phonics with the capacity to teach learners through reading interventions. The Innovative Learners is a virtual tutoring agency trusted by parents because we:
- Teach using decoding skills and phonics.
- Improve students’ reading confidence.
- Teach letters and letter sound recognition.
- Use teachers with classroom experience.
- Incorporate diversity in our lessons.
- Help readers grow 3-5 levels after working with our program.
Don’t believe me? Check out some of our parent testimonials here. We would love to work with your reader! Complete the application here to get started.
Listen to the Podcast
The Unfiltered Truth about Athletic Scholarships and how to secure one for your child – Raising Readers
- The Unfiltered Truth about Athletic Scholarships and how to secure one for your child
- How to create a village of advocates to help support you and your child.
- How to navigate IEP's and advocate for neurodiverse readers and thinkers.
- How to raise readers while making time for yourself
- Diverse Books: Which books actually help?
