What is phonics?
Phonics is a methodology used in the classroom to teach toddlers how to read.
A lot of CBSE, as well as Cambridge schools, adopt Phonics for their preschools in order to give an impactful headstart to the student’s journey of learning English.
Phonics involves the connections between printed letters and sounds, through this the child can know the relationship between letters and sounds and how to use this knowledge to identify words while reading and writing. Phonics is one of the aspects of literacy learning. Without knowing letter-sound correspondences, learners are deprived of a fundamental means of recognizing and producing known words and figuring out new ones when reading/writing. There are a lot of new terminologies that are connected to teaching phonics like- phonics, decoding, grapheme, digraph, phoneme, sounding out, blending, and high-frequency words.
Phonics vs Conventional learning:
- Phonics allows children to see letters written on a page and provides them with the tools to understand it properly. Beyond reading and writing, it helps children develop general thinking skills such as probabilistic reasoning and reasoning by analogy.
- Learning through phonics will improve their fluency and give them the confidence to decode big and difficult words.
- Unfamiliar words are easier to unravel as children develop their phonemic awareness.
- Students learning phonics will become familiar with the syllable structure. With the help of phonics, they will know that a closed syllable will end in a consonant and have a short vowel, while an open syllable will end in a vowel that makes a long sound.
- Also, knowing the spelling patterns makes reading multi-syllabic words easier.
- Yes, many words in the English language are not spelled correctly phonetically, which may frustrate the new readers initially. Hence a reader cannot solely depend upon phonics but should be aware of sight words and high-frequency words and the way they are read.
How to Teach Phonics to your kids:
- Talk about the name of the letter and the sound it makes.
- Help your child to brainstorm and think of the words that begin with the sound of the letter you are introducing/practicing. Do not give direct answers, instead give them clues to identify the words.
- Try to make it more hands-on, play games, riddles, sound hunt games, etc to recapitulate the sounds.
- It’s okay if your child wants to re-read favorite books from earlier years. In fact, it’s actually beneficial!
- Once the phonics sounds are in place, start decoding words and gradually move to simple sentences.
- Ask your child to observe hoardings, identify the sounds, and try to decode the spellings.
Have a fun and happy phonic learning experience.
By Minal Dave
