Phonics is so important to your child’s development that you really need to understand the modern-day approach. Phonics has only fairly recently been established as the very best method of supporting your child to develop their early reading and early writing skills. It may well be very different to what happened when you and I were learning to read and write. Lets cast our minds back...
It wouldn't have happened in my day!!!
Even before starting Primary School, it seemed the race was on to learn my ‘ABCs’. I have vivid memories of singing the ABC alphabet song repeatedly at PlaySchool. The thinking was that by being able to recite this ‘educational’ song, it would empower us with all the reading and writing knowledge that we needed for Reception class. But only knowing the letter names – such as C (pronounced: see), A (ay), T (tee) doesn’t make for easier learning when the short, pure sounds – c (as in castenet), a (as in ant), t (as in tennis) – can be blended together to form the correct sounding word.
These days it is felt that the innocent ABC song, is just that. Sure, how many of us have hummed that song to ourselves in a bid to hurriedly work out the alphabetical order of a list – but other than correctly ordering the alphabet, knowing the capital names of letters didn’t really help us read and write.
It is now understood that equipping children with the skills to hear and distinguish the different sounds in their environment is the best approach. It allows your child to develop phonological awareness. This awareness starts from a really early age and is not something that we leave to your child’s pre-school year. Initially, it starts off as determining sounds within the environment; asking the children what they can hear, in order to get them to stop and actually listen. The joy of the children pointing out sounds such as birds, cars, roadworks etc plays an important part of building the bigger picture. This is reinforced through fun songs, actions, games and rhymes. Eventually, we introduce letter sounds and this is most effective where children have a strong foundation in phonological awareness. The pleasure we take as practitioners in hearing a child proudly cry out “sun – that begins with sss doesn’t it?’ makes it all worthwhile as it evidences everything that we are striving to achieve.
For more information on how we teach children about phonics and develop your child’s early reading and early writing skills, together with how you can help them at home, you can download the Letters & Sounds guide from letters-and-sounds.com or please look out for news of our ‘Phonics Workshops for Parents’ coming soon.
