Beginning to Read

In School:

It is important to learn letter-sound relationships (phonics) when learning to read, as the English language uses the letters in the alphabet to represent sounds. Learning the sounds that each letter makes, and how a change in sound comes when the letters are blended together, helps students read faster and become more fluent.

Various studies in reading development have shown that the phonics approach is more effective than meaning-based approaches, such as the whole-language approach, in improving young children’s reading skills. 

For example, to help children recognise the words ‘pig’, ‘big’ and ‘dig’, teachers might put these words in the following sentences and encourage the children to read these sentences multiple times: 'I can see a big pig. The pig can dig in the mud. The pig is having a mud bath.' You can see this in effect when they read their Oxford Reading Tree books, this familiarity allows children to memorise ‘big’, ‘pig’, and ‘dig’. Teachers can show that although the words ‘big’, ‘pig’, and ‘dig’ have different beginning sounds, the three words contain the same rhyme family ‘-ig’. Children can reflect on the shared spelling patterns across the target words. Knowledge of these patterns will help children sound out familiar words, and predict the pronunciation of unfamiliar words.

The phonetic approach is successful in many ways, for example by seeking to improve children’s phonological awareness – sound awareness and manipulation skills – before teaching letter-sound relationships. Sound awareness refers to children’s abilities to identify the different sound units within a word, for example, syllables, onsets (beginning sounds), rhymes (vowels with/without an ending consonant) and phonemes (individual sounds). Sound manipulation includes combining sound units to form a word (known as blending, e.g., b + a + d = bad) or breaking a word down into its component sound units (known as segmentation, e.g., bad = b + a + d).

With this foundation of phonological awareness, associating sounds with letters will be much easier for children and children who have learned strong phonological awareness are able to read with greater ease and success than children who haven't.

At Home:

Parents play a crucial role in fostering children’s reading development. It helps if parents recycle the words that their children have learnt from school in their daily conversations. It also helps if parents read, with their children, stories that have been encountered in school.

Parents can reinforce their children’s knowledge of letter-sound relationships by asking questions such as, 'What is the beginning letter in this word? What sound does it make? What is the last letter in the word? What sound does it make?’

In conclusion, phonics learning enables children to learn to read, and write, faster and improves their spelling. Making phonics more fun by singing songs or playing games allows the knowledge to be used in a practical way and, as children learn more effectively through play, they will be more likely to remember the lessons long term. It is a basic skill that helps build the foundations for further learning and the help at home can expedite the process even more.

Mrs Kulishova, Reception/Year 1 Teacher.