say these sounds aloud and only then run them together quickly( known as blending) to say sheep.
At school, your child will be taught the different combinations of letters in a very specific order. The class teacher might tell you that they are in a particular group or Phase. This means that they know exactly how many letters and groups of letters your child knows and are teaching them to read by recognizing these in books. Your child may bring home a book which they can read almost independently using their phonics but there may be some words which they will still find difficult. This is because some of our more common words have very uncommon spellings. For example, the word‘ said’ has three phonemes – s, e and d. But the way the phoneme‘ e’ is represented is very unusual. Your child may be taught that this is a‘ tricky’ word because the digraph‘ ai’ is a very unusual way of recording the phoneme‘ e’.
If you want to know more about how your child is being taught to read using phonics, ask their class teacher. They will be able to tell you where your child is, what they can do independently and how you can help them practise using their phonics.
Five Ways to Help Your Child to Read Using Phonics
When you ask your child to sound out a word, first make sure that they recognize the graphemes or digraphs and know the sounds they make. Check with their teacher where your child is in their phonics.
If you child can’ t‘ sound it out’ ask them which bits( graphemes) they know and which bits( graphemes) they don’ t know. You can tell them the graphemes they don’ t know and this will help them read the word.
If your child is struggling on a word, write it on a separate piece of paper. This helps them to concentrate on the word they are struggling with.
If your child is not sure how to blend the word using phonics, adding‘ buttons’ and‘ bars’ to the word helps. For example in the word‘ church’, we add a bar under each digraph … ch ur ch. In the word‘ flight’ we add a mixture of buttons and bars … f l igh t. The bars go under all the letters that make one sound – two, three or even four( e. g. ough in through). Putting the bars and buttons in helps your child to see each set of letters as one sound.
Once your child has seen a word several times in their reading, encourage them to stop‘ sounding out’ and to start saying the word as a whole word. Sometimes they will use sounding out as a safety net and will continue to do it long after they need to. The less they have to sound out words using phonics, the more they will read fluently and will start to understand what they have read.
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