Have you heard of a phonics approach called ‘Speech to Print’? Another name for it is ‘Linguistic Phonics’. This approach is used in a number of programmes: Sounds Write, EBLI and Reading Simplified. The Speech to Print approach starts from the sounds in words (phonemes) and not the spellings (letters or spelling patterns). It follows […]
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Of all the strategies used for teaching reading, I believe that word-building is the most powerful. Why is that? Word-building incorporates two fundamental skills in learning to read: as children build a word, they learn to segment and blend. When we ask children to build a word, e.g., ‘map’ they need to segment the phonemes […]
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I love the way Christopher Such writes about teaching reading, and if you haven’t read his book The Art and Science of Teaching Primary Reading – do. I have found it is very accessible and really useful for busy teachers to keep up with recent research into reading instruction. What I like most about his […]
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Here at Phonic Books we have been publishing decodable books for beginner and catch-up readers for seventeen years. During those years we attended many conferences and education shows. When discussing whether our books were suited to students with Special Educational Needs, we always deferred to the teachers working in SEND settings. While we were confident […]
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The split digraphs a-e, e-e, i-e, o-e, u-e are very common spellings. They have different names: Silent e, Magic e, Vowel Consonant e, Bossy e, Split digraphs. Many children struggle to read words with these spelling patterns, so we need to teach them explicitly. Why do we have these spelling patterns in English? The ‘e’ […]
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Here we are in the last term of school and soon the summer will be upon us. It is really important that during this summer, the ‘summer slump’ of learning loss will not add to the learning loss that has already impacted so many children during the last two years. A good way to prevent […]
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What are homophones? Homophones are words that sound the same but have different meanings. The word ‘homophone’ has a Greek origin. ‘Homo’ meaning ‘same’ and ‘phone’ meaning ‘sound’. So, the word ‘homophone’ means a same-sounding words that have different meanings. Some homophones have the same spellings for example, the words ‘row’ as in ‘to row […]
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Many teachers are now using decodable books to help their beginner readers practice the phonics taught in the classroom lessons. This is because it is now accepted that decodable texts, which are controlled texts, help children develop decoding, and decoding ability is an essential skill for learning to read. It is important that the books […]
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The verb ‘to dictate’ is not one that teachers warm to. This is because we love to foster creativity in our children and to get them to write their own ideas. BUT when teaching children how to read and spell we need to use all the best tools we have to instruct our beginner readers […]
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When I trained to be a teacher in one of the best universities in London, I learned a great deal about the wonderful world of books, how to select quality picture books and spot racially biased books, and even how to make books by stitching them together by hand. We made book covers using potato […]
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