Phonics Children

Teaching Phonics to Children

Phonics is one of the oldest methods of teaching children to read. It is not just a method to teach children how to read, but it is a very necessary component of a good teaching program. Phonics is the key to word mastery, and it is essential in learning to reading. To master reading, children must gain a knowledge of the sounds of letters, and understand the effect of the letter's sound in forming the word.

Phonics children gain a strong grasp of phonics and this gives them the ability to pronounce new words, helps them with their spelling abilities, and also develops clear articulation and correct enunciation. Phonics should be taught to children early on, starting with just several minutes a day, and as the child develops and grows older, this can be increased to 10, 15, or 20 minutes.

One of the first steps of learning to read is to help the young child train their ears to help them recognize the individual sounds of the words. This can be easily done through listening and practicing. Point to a word, and say it clearly and slowly, making an effort to sound out each of the phonemes in the word. Then say the same word normally. For example:

J-U-M-P  JUMP
S-T-O-P STOP
C-A-T CAT
K-I-D-S KIDS

When just beginning phonics teaching, these ear training exercises should be performed often, and performed consistently such that the children gains a good phonetic sense. Not all children will develop this phonetic sense at the same rate, and patience will be needed to run these ear training exercises on a consistent basis to achieve results. Always try to keep the lessons and exercises interesting, so that your child does not lose interest.

You can also work with blending practices during your everyday speech when talking with your child. Simply pick a word or two from your sentences and segment these words, sounding out all of the sounds of the words clearly. For example, you want to tell your child that it's time to eat dinner, and you say:

"Bobby, it's dinner time, go wash your hands please."

You could easily pick two words from your sentence, segment them, and sound out those words clearly:

"Bobby, it's d-i-nn-er time, go wash your haaaannnnds please."

So, here you took the two words "dinner" and "hands" and segmented them, and you clearly pronounced each of the sounds of these words. Doing this will get your child to catch on to the idea of blending and helps train their ears to identify the phonemes in the words.

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