HOW TO HELP YOUR
CHILD TO READ USING PHONICS
Debs Bragard was a National Literacy Strategy Consultant for 11 years working for Tameside LA. She is a managing director and Lead Consultant for BC Education Ltd which provides consultancy support and training courses across the North West
From the moment your child picks up a book, they will be faced with a puzzle. They watch you solve this puzzle whenever you read to them. Hopefully, they will want to solve this puzzle for themselves. But the puzzle is very difficult to solve. In fact, teachers refer to it as the Alphabetic Code. And to solve this code, children need to know phonics.
What is phonics? Phonics is the way that we take the speech sounds that we hear in words and record them in writing. When we speak we use 43 different speech sounds. These are called phonemes. Sometimes we only need one letter to represent each speech sound( phoneme) in reading. When there is only one letter we call it a grapheme. For example the word‘ dog’ has three sounds( phonemes): d o and g represented by three graphemes d o and g.
The problem is that we only have 26 letters in our alphabet so we have to use these letters in a variety of ways. For example, the word‘ sheep’ also has three sounds: sh ee and p but now they are represented by five letters. In the word sheep, the letter p is a grapheme. When there are two letters representing one sound, we call it a digraph. In the word sheep, the letters sh are a digraph. The letters ee are also a digraph and we call this a vowel digraph. If you ask your child to‘ sound out’ the word sheep, they will have to see the word as the digraph sh, digraph ee and grapheme p. They will have to know what each digraph sounds like,
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