There is a difference between ‘sounding out’ and ‘blending’. Sounding out a word entails recognising the letter/sound correspondences, e.g. seeing the letters “p” and being able to say the sound /p/. Children will need to remember the letter shape and distinguish it from similar looking letters, e.g., p/q; b/d/; m/w/; f/t etc. They also need […]
Read More
If asked, many early years and special school teachers would probably say that one of the first things children should learn is to recognise and later write their name. One single word, yet many children seem to find this difficult, and it can take a surprisingly long time to achieve. The main reason for this […]
Read More
Multisensory learning is when a child uses a number of senses to experience a learning activity. This could be seeing, hearing and touching or manipulating letters. We experience the world with our senses and these allow us to absorb and learn new things. Learning in a multisensory way helps children remember what they have learned […]
Read More
Word chains are really important for all children learning to read, especially struggling readers. Some programmes call this activity ‘Sound swap’ (Sounds-Write) or ‘Switch it’ (Reading Simplified). Why word chains are a useful teaching tool Word chains offer children practice of the underlying skills of reading: blending, segmenting and phoneme manipulation (adding, deleting and swapping […]
Read More
We know that phonological awareness is one of the 6 components of learning to read: phonological awareness – being able to identify sounds in words which includes, syllables, rhyme, alliteration and phonemes. phonics – to recognise letters and combination of letters that represent the 44 sounds of English fluency – ability to read with pace, […]
Read More
1. Step-by-step You don’t need to teach the whole alphabet to get reading going. Start with a few letters and get children to build words with them. Our series starts with the sounds s, a, t, i, m. 2. Word-building rocks! Word-building is the best way to teach reading and spelling. Write the letters on […]
Read MoreLearning to read, initially, has two components: 1. knowledge – learning the graphemes and the sounds they represent 2. skills – learning to blend sounds into words and segment sounds for spelling Many teachers offer lots of fun ways to learn the graphemes. They do this in step-by-step progression starting from the simple graphemes progressing […]
Read MoreMany young children learn to sing the ‘A, B, C’ song in nursery or at home. This song teaches them the names and the order of the letters of the alphabet. This is a great way to store the alphabetic order of letters in our long-term memory. I still use the alphabet song when using […]
Read MoreNow that everyone is talking ‘Synthetic Phonics speak’ and it seems like Michael Gove will continue to do so – it may be a good time to clarify some of the terms that are being used.
Read MoreWe have found that lots of children are OK blending 3 sound words but have difficulty blending 4 and 5 sounds words with adjacent consonants (CVCC, CCVC and CCVCC words). Dandelion Launchers series now has 12 new books which tackle this reading skill. With no more than 10 words of text on each page, and 4 […]
Read More
