Phonics

- Phonological Awareness - Teaching Phonics

Phonemic awareness is the conscious knowledge of spoken words and sounds in language. (Hill. S, 2006, p 173)

__Phonics__

Phonics is both an approach to instruction and a strategy for word identification and spelling (Richgels 2004). The focus in phonics is on the sound-letter relationships which is used in reading and writing. For a phonics teaching website [|click here]

__Alphabetic Principle__

The alphabetic principle is the idea that letters in words usually stand for specific sounds. (Hill 2006 p208) A single letter or a combination of letters are used to represent the sounds that we hear in English. In the English alphabet there are approximately 44 sounds or phonemes made up of different combinations and single letters. A section of the alphabetic principle is __letter identification.__ Letter identification involves early developers learning how sounds are represented in print.

__Teaching Phonics__

n this aspect of phonics it is important to promote investigation and exploration into sound-letter relationships and try to encourage children to solve the phonics puzzle.

There are different approaches that a teacher can take when teaching phonics. These include: __Synthetic Phonics-__ Children blend together individual letters to make words __VAKT-__ Visual Auditory Kinaesthetic Tactile Involves using the sense to directly teach the individual letters and sounds (Hill 2006) An example from (Hill 2006) Letters are traced while saying the name and sound, then blended together to make words. __Analytic Phonics__ Begins with writing a word on the board that the child knows. Then the teacher breaks the words into components. Then a vowel sound is found and the teacher gets the children to make other words that use the same sounds as the vowel sound they just found in a word that they know. __Word Study__ This is a spelling approach where children categorise words and word patterns by sorting words and pictures according to their common orthographical pattern (Hill 2006) An example- 'rane' and 'rain' __Making Words__ An active, hands on activity where children learn to look for patterns in words and learn how changing just one letter or the letter order, changes the whole word (Cunningham and Cunningham 1992; Cunningham, Hall and Defee 1998).

When it comes to teaching phonics and exercises, many teachers like to use a more common approach the problem-solving approach to phonics. This involves demonstrating to children how various sounds in English can be mapped to different letter combinations.

Example: Build a word list that fit these letter combinations..... -th