Effective ways to teach phonics
Phonics is one of many reading strategies for children, but unlike others, it focuses on matching letters to sounds. The goal is to provide children with the tools they need to ‘decode’ written language by assisting them in hearing, identifying, and using sounds to create various words in the English language. It is a tried-and-true method of teaching children to read and write.
But how do you teach children to read and write using phonics? Each school will take a slightly different approach to phonics, but the following top phonics strategies may be useful.
Focus on vowels
Because almost every word in the English language contains a vowel, teaching children vowel sounds is a great place to start when developing phonics strategies. However, vowels have short and long sounds to distinguish between, so this is a crucial phonics skill to master – for example, the letter ‘a’ has a short sound in ‘cat’ but a long sound in ‘cake’. Learning vowel sounds early on provides children with solid phonics building blocks that will make more sense when adding consonants to make words.
Matching sounds and pictures
There are numerous other ways to incorporate visual examples into a reading strategy for children. A child’s first symbols are pictures. They may not know how to spell cow, but they’ll know a cow when they see one. Using pictures or videos to teach sounds can help pupils who struggle with letters gain confidence. They can learn keywords that are used to remember the sounds and shapes of the alphabet letters using picture cards.
Why not try using flashcards that include both the phonics sound and a bright and colourful image of an item that contains that sound? Picture examples are important for visual learners because they can help them remember and make the connection between the sounds and their associations. Play-Doh or other phonics toys can be used to add a visual element to words and make the activity more enjoyable.
Sound out words with your arm
This is one of many reading strategies for children that involve kinaesthetic learning or tactile learning through touch. It entails saying words out loud on your arm and encouraging children to do the same. This is how you do it: Hold your arm out in front of you, one hand on your shoulder, and tap down your arm, saying each sound in a word as you go. When you’ve finished, return your hand to your shoulder and say the entire word, sliding all the way down your arm. Say ‘cat’ as you slide, then ‘c – a – t’ with a distinct tap for each sound.
Some visual learners benefit from visual and tactile tools, such as the word slide: it can help children focus on the sequence of letters and how words are structured; it can also improve memory and allow them to retain and recall information. It also allows them to work independently to decode a word (even if no other tools are available), and it can be more fun and engaging than other methods!
Another way to sound words out is by using Hope’s electronic phonics. Put in the word you want to learn and sound it out together with your pupil. Ideal for tactile learning with your class.
Introduce word families
Word families are groups of words that share a feature, such as ‘bake,’ ‘cake,’ and ‘make,’ which all belong to the ‘ake’ word family. If children can learn these common features, they will find reading and spelling new words easier in this word family. One of the best phonics strategies for teaching about word families is to use onset and rime – onset refers to the sounds at the beginning of a word, and rime refers to the groups of sounds that follow. By breaking words down into these elements, children can see different word families in action and improve their phonological awareness. Consider the word ‘fig’: the onset is ‘f’ and the rime is ‘ig’; combine them to form ‘fig’. Then when your pupils face the word ‘jig’ they can spot the pattern (and the word family ‘ig’) and decode the word.
Electronic phonics
Electronic phonics are perfect to start your class with phonics. It supports the development of independent reading and spelling skills, enabling your pupils to self-correct and assess their own progress, all whilst making phonics fun!
Complete with a range of difficulty levels, it provides versatility and inclusivity. It also includes an exciting range of point-scoring games, creating an electrifying element of competition for pupils.
As a teacher, we know you are constantly having to prep your resources with, printing them, cutting them out and everything in between. But with electronic phonics, it eliminates the need to copy or laminate phonics resources, saving your precious teacher time.
Use electronic phonics as an exciting, tactile and multi-sensory resource amongst your class with additional learning needs, particularly in relation to their spoken language and working memory.
Try chanting
Chanting may sound old-fashioned, but it can be a very effective phonics strategy for children. This method entails holding up a series of flashcards, each featuring different phonics symbols. You make the sound, and the children repeat it, using the cards as visual cues. It’s a really simple, quick, and easy activity to do at the beginning of each day to review the sounds you’re learning that week – and you can make it fun by doing a little dance, song or some actions as you work through them! Regularly repeating the sounds helps your class retain the information.
Look for patterns
Children may understand phonics when dealing with individual words or sounds, but when placed in the context of a sentence, paragraph, or larger text, they may become confused. Pattern searches are a useful addition to your reading strategies for kids because they help them identify repeating sounds, word families and categorise words with the same form – and they can also be entertaining. Give children a piece of text, a story, or even a magazine or newspaper and send them on a hunt for a specific phoneme – can they find all the words that begin with ‘st’? Can they find all the words that begin with the letter ‘ake’?
Break it down
When children have mastered single-syllable words, they are ready to tackle more complex, multi-syllable words. However, when confronted with a long word, children can become overwhelmed. The answer is chunking! Covering the word with your hand or a piece of paper and revealing it in ‘chunks’ at a time allows children to decode each syllable separately before putting it all together. For example, the word ‘monkey’ is formed by combining the two chunks ‘mon’ and ‘key’.
Electronic phonics is perfect for breaking down words. With the power to embed key segmenting, blending and spelling skills, electronic phonics can be used in conjunction with a range of different validated systematic synthetic phonics programmes. Perfect for making phonics fun for your class.
Letter and sounds
Explicitly teaching the letter and sound correspondences lie at the heart of good ways to teach phonics.
It is essential to understand a little of the theory of synthetic phonics to be effective. Here are a few important points to consider:
Letter names vs letter sounds
It is crucial that your class understand the difference between the names of the letters of the English alphabet and the sounds, as these are two very different things. For example, the letter c is called /see/ but the letter itself usually denotes either a /k/ or /s/ sound. It may seem obvious but it’s one of the most important things to consider when teaching phonics.
Letters don’t make the sound
As the limited letters used in English are needed to represent many different sounds, it’s important to point out to pupils that letters don’t make the sounds; they are simply an option for showing the sound. Often there will be more than one way to show the same sound; for example, the sound /s/ can be encoded in several different ways, including as s, c, and ps. When you are asking your pupils to write something, you can make the sound and ask them what letter they could use to show this sound. This type of phrasing reinforces the correct relationship between the letters and sounds.
Avoid lazy vowels
It is also important to remember that when teaching the letters and sounds, avoid making the lazy vowel sound at the end of it. For example, when pronouncing the /k/ sound, make it crisp and short rather than adding an extra -uh sound at the end. This will make it much easier for your pupils to blend sounds later.
Teaching phonics can be difficult if you’re not an expert, and it’s the fundamental part of the English language and the curriculum. Use these strategies in your classroom – it doesn’t have to be all – but if you incorporate them in your English lessons, your pupils will surely understand phonics.
For more ways to teach phonics, check out our phonics games and activities blog.
And if you have more strategies to help teachers to teach phonics, let us know on our Instagram or Twitter.
