Helping Your Child With Phonics

As a parent, there are many things you can do at home to support your child as they learn to read. Seeing adults enjoy reading, having access to books and other reading materials, and talking about things you have read can all help children develop a positive attitude towards reading.

There are also some specific things you can do to support your child as they develop early reading skills through phonics.

Early Development

Because phonics focuses on the connection between spoken sounds and written letters, children benefit from developing an awareness of the sounds and rhythms of speech from an early age.

Singing lullabies and nursery rhymes to babies as you rock them will help them to develop a sense of rhythm and rhyme.

Toddlers can enjoy rhythm through simple musical activities such as marching with a drum or shaking a tambourine. Talking together about everyday sounds, animal noises, and singing familiar action songs and nursery rhymes, such as 'Old MacDonald', all help to build early listening skills.

Because young readers need to tell the difference between the shapes of letters, shape recognition is also an essential pre-reading skill. Activities which help to develop shape recognition include jigsaw puzzles and shape matching games.

When you read with your child, you can enjoy stories together while also drawing attention to the phonics skill of segmenting, or breaking words down into individual sounds. Rhyming picture books are a fun way to introduce children to sound patterns and to help them notice that small changes in sounds can change the meaning of a word. There are lots of great rhyming books for young children, which you can often find at your local library or bookshop. Here are a few popular examples to get you started:

Starting School

Many parents wonder whether they should focus on teaching the alphabet when their child starts school. In most phonics approaches, children are taught the sounds that letters represent before learning their letter names.

You can, however, help your child with the phonics skills of letter recognition, sounding out and blending. When you read you can run your finger along under the words you are reading to show your child what letters you are sounding out. Your child will then hear how those sounds blend together to make words.

Another crucial phonics skill is segmentation, which is the ability to pick out individual sounds that make up the words we hear. You can help children with this by playing I-Spy using the letter sounds rather than the letter names. Teaching children tongue twisters is another fun way to make them aware of sounds at the beginnings of words.

Playing games like Snap and Happy Families will help children improve their shape recognition skills.

Year One

When children become familiar with letter sounds, they may also begin to learn letter names, for example through songs such as the Alphabet Song. Continuing to read together, and occasionally encouraging your child to read short, simple sections aloud, helps them practise sounding out and blending.

At this stage you should encourage your child without placing high expectations on them. When they read aloud, they will do so very slowly at first but will gradually get better as their sounding out and blending skills improve. When children write, they should be able to identify and write the sounds they hear. Because they are just writing sounds at this stage, just encourage them to write without expecting that their spelling will always be correct.

Year Two

By Year Two, many children are familiar with most common phonemes. At this stage, parents can support progress by encouraging regular reading to help improve reading speed, accuracy and confidence.

The key focus should be to give your child as much positive encouragement as possible.

Now is a good time to get your child their own library card. Some parents are concerned that their children should be reading only educational material or "good" children's literature - but the important thing as this stage is to let children choose their own books so that they can pick out ones that interest them. This will encourage them to be independent and enthusiastic readers. Your role as a parent should be simply to encourage them to read as much as possible including fiction, non-fiction, magazines, and even joke books and comic books.

Spelling becomes a challenge in Year Two because children are learning that there are different ways to write the same sound, and that the same sound can sometimes be represented differently. You can help them with this by telling them jokes that focus on puns and wordplay. You can also help their spelling by playing word games with them like Boggle or Junior Scrabble.

The most important thing is to offer positive encouragement and avoid placing unnecessary pressure on your child. Children develop at different rates, and learning is often most effective when it feels enjoyable and playful.

Phonics Bloom provides games and practice activities that can be used alongside a range of phonics approaches to support children learning to read at home and at school.

Continue reading: When Phonics Doesn’t Work