Phonics Part 2
Blending is a key technique in phonics reading. After learning the sounds of the alphabet, children will be taught to blend sounds to form short words.
Examples of short words are ‘cat’ or ‘map’. ‘Cat’ and ‘map’ each contain 3 phonemes that children learn to sound out as individual letters.
The next step is consonant clusters. Children learn that words can be made of two-letter sounds. For example, ‘friend’ is made of the sounds ‘fr’ and ‘end’.
Another technique you might have heard of is called ‘sounding out’. This is when a child learns how to say more complex or unfamiliar words by identifying the sounds of individual letters. Later, they’ll be able to blend individual sounds together.
What is blending in phonics?
Blending letter sounds together helps children ‘sound out’ unfamiliar words. Once a child knows how to say the letters ‘t’, ‘p’, ‘a’, and ‘s’, they can then form words like ‘tap’, ‘taps’, ‘pat’, ‘pats’ and ‘sat’.
How to blend sounds
There are 2 ways to blend sounds in phonics:
After decoding a word by sounding out, a child will then learn to blend the sounds together. There are two ways to do this:
Choppy blending
Smooth blending
Choppy blending
Choppy blending is a technique whereby the sounds of a word are individually sounded without connection e.g., ‘cat’ would be sounded out as ‘c-a-t’.
Sometimes this technique leads children to hear individual sounds instead of the whole word. They might know the letter sound relationships but struggle to connect all the sounds into a meaningful word.
Smooth blending
This is where smooth blending comes in.
As the name suggests, smooth blending blends all the sounds in a word together without a pause. For example, ‘caaaat’.
The trick is to stretch individual sounds to connect them together. If you’re child struggles with choppy blending, give smooth blending a go.
One more thing: don’t forget about pure sounds. This is extremely important in phonics!
Why is it important to use pure sounds in phonics instruction?
‘Pure sounds’ are important in phonics instruction because they are easier for children to blend together. For example, the phoneme ‘s’ is pronounced ‘ssssss’ not ‘es’.
Using ‘pure sounds’ makes reading easier for children and helps them progress faster.
When sounding out it’s very important not to add ‘uh’ to the end of words. So, a parent or teacher may say that letter ‘l’ makes a ‘luh’ sound. This is a mistake!
Adding ‘uh’ results in words that don’t makes sense. ‘Lit’ becomes ‘luh-i-tuh’ instead of ‘lit’. Do you see how this confuses children?
Adding extra sounds to the end of words is a common mistake when teaching phonics but it’s a habit to break if you want to avoid confusion.
Encoding: taking phonics instruction to the next step
Once your child is comfortable sounding out phonemes, the next step is encoding.
What is encoding in phonics?
Encoding is the ability to hear a phoneme (word sound) and write down its corresponding grapheme (letter). Though there are 44 phonemes, children will learn a variety of graphemes in order to spell the words they hear.
Let’s use the example ‘cat’ again. As their phonic abilities develop, children will be able to hear the three distinct sounds in ‘cat’ – ‘c’, ‘a’, and ‘t’. This recognition will allow them to spell ‘cat’ with greater accuracy.
What are the advantages and disadvantages of teaching phonics?
There are many advantages to teaching children phonics.
Research shows that learning phonics can:
Help learners identify letter-sound relationships faster,
Improve reading fluency,
Make sounding out unfamiliar words easier,
Boost vocabulary and language development,
Improve spelling,
Improve a child’s ability to focus,
Help learners understand the structure of a word e.g., the difference between vowels and consonants,
Help young readers learn the rules of English faster,
However, phonics does have a few drawbacks:
Phonics won’t help children learn words that aren’t spelled phonetically. For example, they might pronounce ‘said’ as ‘sayed’,
Phonics doesn’t focus on word comprehension. Therefore, a child might learn how to pronounce a word but not understand what it means.
It’s important to ensure children are making progress in all areas of reading. Reading comprehension, spelling, and vocabulary are all essential parts of mastering the English language.
Therefore, it’s important to take a holistic approach rather than rely on phonics alone.
How do you explain phonics to children?
We believe that children learn best in a positive, low-stress environment. Here are a few tips to help you support your child’s phonics journey.
Make phonics fun!
The aim is to develop your child’s reading capabilities so that they can start enjoying books for themselves. Practice using words relating to topics your child enjoys e.g., space or dinosaurs.
Phonics mini lessons
Keep sessions short. 10 minutes of focused practice is worth hours of wasted effort. Always stop before children get frustrated or bored.
Play a phonics game
Sing songs and rhymes together while encouraging your child to clap when they notice rhyming words. Older children can play a ‘word hunt’ e.g., finding ‘mum’ on the page or a word that begins with ‘p’.
Zero distractions
Pick and time and place to practice where there will be minimal distractions from screens or raucous siblings.
Read together
Studies show that children benefit from reading with a parent. Reading together instills a love of stories, improves reading comprehension, and gives you important shared time together.
Phonics Glossary
When it comes to phonics instruction there’s a lot of tricky terms to remember. However, understanding phonics terminology will help you discuss your child’s reading progress with their teacher and help them learn at home.
Keep track with our handy glossary.
Phonics: method of teaching people to read by linking sounds with symbols.
Phoneme: the sound of a letter or group of letters. For example. ‘cat’ has three phonemes, ‘c’, ‘a’, and ‘t’.
Grapheme: the symbol (or letter) that corresponds to a phoneme.
Decoding: using phonics to sound out the correct pronunciation of a word.
Encoding: the ability to hear a word, and spell it, using the correct graphemes (letters).
Sounding out: speaking word sounds aloud to pronounce a word.
Blending: running together all the sounds in a word in order to read it e.g. ‘bl-a-ck’.
Digraph: Two letters grouped together to make one sound e.g., ‘sh’.
Hopefully, you now have an idea of how effective phonics can be, and all the tools you need to begin reading instruction in phonics.
If you would like further advice and help, please contact LS Tuition.