Articles
Sep 19, 2012
Phonics Games Online
The internet abounds with literacy activities for kids, with a wide variety of phonics games online. These games offer a great resource for parents and teachers to supplement the reading instruction that kids are already receiving at school. Playing phonics games online can help your child learn how words are made up of individual sounds, known as phonemes. This will help develop their phonemic awareness – a fundamental skill for all reading beginners. It’s important that skills gained from phonics games online are also developed within a wider learning framework where they can be applied, reinforced, and understood in a...
Sep 12, 2012
Programs for Reading
Being literate can have an enormous impact on the social and educational life of a child. The importance of literacy remains unquestioned, but the research indicates just how complex the process of learning to read is. Acquiring literacy can be an intricate and difficult process for some children. While it is easy to assume that kids will just ‘pick up’ reading over time, research has found that that is far from being the case. While some kids may have an easier time of reading than others, no young reader just ‘picks up’ reading. There is a complex set of skills...
Sep 12, 2012
Phonics for Kids
Anyone beginning the journey of teaching their child to read quickly learns how important phonics is for kids. You’d be hard-pressed to find a reading program that doesn’t place a lot of emphasis on the importance of phonics. But what is phonics anyway, and why is it so important in the wider scheme of literacy? Although the name sounds complex, the idea of phonics is very simple. The main focus of phonics instruction is to help young readers understand how letters relate to small units of sound, called phonemes, in order to form letter-sound correspondences and spelling patterns. These letter-sound...
Sep 12, 2012
Learning Phonics
Because literacy is so important to a child’s educational and intellectual life, it’s no wonder that there’s more emphasis than ever on kids learning phonics. While phonics once used to be a popular means of instruction, it fell out of favour for a while in education circles because of a tendency to focus on phonics instruction instead of reading real texts. In some cases, kids seemed to spend more time memorising words and spellings than they did on actually reading real texts. After spending a few years kicked out of the classroom and wandering the proverbial halls, phonics is back....