Phonics For Crinklies: A Primer for Parents
28th January, 2007
So what is this phonics lark and why should you, as parents and teachers, care about our little gang of overactive fruits? Sixty four sounds and one hundred words, that's all it takes to bring confidence and launch a child on their journey of exploration.
Phonics Techinques
Phonics is the process of learning to read and write through sounds. There are several types of phonics schemes, we will discuss the one known as synthetic phonics.
- Learn to recognise the sound and associated symbol of the phonic alphabet. There are fourty two of them in total. These represent all of the sounds in the English language. Each sound is symbolically represented by a single letter or pair (digraph) of letters, called a grapheme.
- The learned sounds are then combined into sequences of sounds, for the construction of simple words. This process is called 'blending.' In learning how to blend simple phonemes, pupils can develop an understanding of the phonetic structure of language and an ability to read aloud even unknown combinations of letters.
- Knowing how to blend known sounds allows students to decode unknown sequences of letters. So new words are not intimidating. Learning how to say each word and new sound combination allows students to build memory and add context to new words. So although they will not immediately be able to understand the meaning of C-A-T, they can decode this sequence as CAT in the before learning its meaning. This self reinforcing logical sequence of steps accelerates the process of learning to read.
- Remember that children already have an oral vocabulary before any literacy tuition begins. The 'synthetic phonics' methodologies are a way for them to begin to translatethis foundation of spoken language into written code. They can then use these skills to support the expansion of their vocabulary while developing reading and writing skills.
- While blending and decoding are being mastered, children can develop their encoding skills. By recognising the phonics components of spoken words (decoding) and transforming them into the component phonemes allows children to write down the symbolic reprsentations of these phonemes (The graphemes). This is the beginning of writing and spelling. Eventually this skill will extend to writing down familiar known words and expressions, followe, eventually, by their own thoughts and ideas.
- These reading and writing skills are the basic tools necessary for each child's personal journey towards attaining higher level thinking.
To Recap: Some the main learning strategies for synthetic phonics:
- Decoding
- Recognising the individual phonetic sounds
- Sounding out
- Saying out loud each phonetic componenent of a word
- Blending
- Putting together separate phonic sounds into combinations to form words
- Encoding
- Putting togethere sequences of symbols (graphemes) to represent sounds as written language. This is really the process of writing down sounds.