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
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
Phonics Activities
Phonics instruction has received a lot of attention in education circles of late. It is making a much-needed return to literacy instruction after falling out of favour for a time. The particular kind of phonics instruction that has been criticised is the analytic approach to phonics that encouraged rote learning. This method attempted to force-feed whole words to kids learning to read, rather than teach them how to approach words in their more manageable bite-sized parts. Phonics is simply the understanding of how letters are linked to sounds (also called phonemes). It’s the knowledge of how letters and sounds relate...
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....