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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