How You Can Help Your Child Learn Phonics at Home
Is your child struggling to learn phonics?
Then you will have seen the confusion in their eyes when faced with a word that you know they’ve seen a hundred times and yet they still can’t read it.
Here are 5 simple ideas that you can do at home to help your child get back on track.
Make sure your child learns phonics in a multi-sensory way. What I mean by this is, help them to HEAR the sounds, FEEL the sounds and SEE the sounds EVERY time they are learning them. We all have different learning styles, so it’s important children are offered lots of different ways to learn new things. This will give them the best chance of getting these letters and sounds to stick, so they can get on with the skill of reading.
When children are learning phonics at school there is a lot of emphasis on HEARING the INDIVIDUAL sounds. At home you can give them other opportunities to hear sounds in a more PLAYFUL way. Rhyming is a fun and really helpful way to learn about sounds. For example, if your child has learned that sounding out ‘C-A-T’ makes ‘CAT’, you can play with the middle and end part of the word to find other words that rhyme. Just swap out the first letter to discover words like ‘BAT, SAT, MAT and HAT’. You can even find nonsense words that rhyme like ‘DAT’, ‘ZAT’ and ‘GAT’. Children love to imagine what those made up words could mean and even make a song out of them.
For a child to be able to sound out a letter in a word, they need to be able to link the SHAPE of the letter to the SOUND that it makes. Children will find this easier if they spend time making the shape in lots of different ways. They can make the shape by MOVING their arms like a giant pencil and draw the shape in the air whilst saying it out loud. They can also make the shape of the letter out of things like pipe cleaners, plasticine or playdough, shaving cream or draw it in sand or uncooked rice. The time spent on making the letters will focus their attention longer than simply seeing it in print on a page. Also, forming the shape in the air will aid muscle memory which will help them to write it more easily.
Lots of children know the individual sounds but when they see them in whole words, they find it difficult to recognise them. Phonics is a means to an end. The end goal is that children don’t need to use phonics because they recognise the whole word rather than its individual parts. So, once your child has had a little practice with HEARING and FEELING sounds, move them quickly on to SEEING whole words. The most effective way to do this is to write the word onto a Post it and hold it up to their eye level. Tell them what the word says and ask them to take a PICTURE of it with an imaginary camera. Once they have done this, take the Post It away but encourage them to keep looking at the photograph they just took. Ask them to spell the word either by using letter sounds or letter names. This visual approach to learning will often be the missing piece that helps children to move from individual sounds to recognising whole words. It’s what all good readers do and what we as adults take for granted.
Focus and concentration has a time limit for everyone but it is especially true for children who are learning something as important as phonics. The average time we can expect children to concentrate is between 2-5 minutes for every year of their age. So, if you have a 6 year old and you want them to really learn something, you have about 12 minutes before concentration starts wavering. This is important to bear in mind because we not only want to get the best out of our children’s learning time, but also because we want them to FEEL that learning is enjoyable. Learning doesn’t FEEL enjoyable when you need to move, have a little brain break or simply move onto something else.
There are so many creative and fun ways to help your child get to grips with phonics. If you want more tips on how to help your child with phonics or any other literacy skill book a call to talk to me about how my programmes can help.
