A guide to letter formation
Do the write thing: How kids learn to write and how to help them do […]
Read morePhonics is a way of teaching children how to read and write. It helps children hear, identify and use different sounds that distinguish one word from another. If you imagine written words are a bit like a secret code and it is only when you know the sound of each individual letter and how those letters sound when they are combined that you can crack the code aka read, and ultimately write and spell.
There are 44 phonic sounds and children will first learn single sounds and then blend the sounds to make up words. Unlike how many parents were taught to read and write via the alphabet, phonics is not taught in alphabetical order but rather in phonetic groups.
Given that the alphabet only has 26 letters, this helps children work out all those sounds that have more than one possible spelling!
Children focus on how words break down into their own component sounds before later recombining them to read the whole word. This process is known as segmenting and blending.
For example, when faced with the word cat, a student might run their finger under the first letter and make the initial /k/ sound, then /a/, and, finally, /t/.
Once they have successfully segmented these individual sounds, they then blend them together to say the word /kat/.
With practice, the speed with which students can look at a word, segment the sounds, and then blend these sounds together to read the word rapidly increases. This makes learning to read through the phonics method the most efficient way for most children to learn not just to read but ultimately to write too.