Hi everyone It’s Liz Dunoon here

Does your child know that different letters represent different sounds in words? If so, they are well on their way to grasping a major step in the learn to read and spell process. If not keep watching or reading.

Today I’m going to show you how to teach your child to read from home using phonics and phonemic awareness also known as synthetic phonics, and blending sounds.

When my three children were in primary school they all experienced learning difficulties and I helped them to catch up at school and have great success. As a qualified teacher who specialises in learning difficulties and literacy, I have since helped 100’s of children to learn to read and spell from home.

‘ap’ has “a-“ and “puh”. That is two phonemes or sounds. Ask your child if they can hear two sounds. Get them to put a dot above the “a-” and a dot above the “puh”. To show the two sounds they can hear. Then get them to say them one after the other “a-“ ”puh”, “a-“ ”puh”, “ap”. Blending the two sounds together, is what makes two single sounds become a word part. Like in the words; ‘map’, ‘cap’ and ‘sap’.

Let’s try that with ‘em’. ‘em’ has “e-“ and “mmm”. That is two sounds. Ask your child if they can hear two sounds. Get them to put a dot above each sound they can hear. Then get them to say each sound one after the other until they blend them to make the word part “e-“ “mmm”. Blending these two phonemes makes them into a word part in words like; ‘hem’, ‘them’ and more complex words like ‘feminine’.

You can do this with lots of word parts. This is training your child’s ears and their brains to hear all the different sounds, because the English language is a code, a sound-symbol code, and that is what phonics is. It is a tool to break the sound symbol code of reading and spelling English words.

Here is a list you can explore with your child or student

The next logical step is putting a single consonant on to the beginning of these word parts to make simple, 3 letter; consonant – vowel – consonant words’ also known as ‘CVC’ words. Very soon, you will have a child who is decoding and reading these simple words. Make sure they indicate how many sounds they can hear each time by putting a dot at the top of each letter or sound… or another fun way is showing you the number of sounds on their fingers or showing you the right number of blocks to indicate how many sounds they can hear. For these examples, it will be 3 each time. Remember we are learning to blend the single sounds together to make simple CVC words.

“mmm” “a-“ “puh”. Remind the learner that they have to hold each sound, or keep each sound going, until they get to the next one. “rrr” “e-“ “puh”

Here is a list of simple CVC words which you can explore with your child or student

If you want more information on how to teach your child to read and spell and find how out to access posters and many more educational resources… Join me on my free webinar by clicking the link below.

Did you learn phonics when you went to school? If so comment below… What tools did your teacher use?

I’ll see you next time in video 7, which is called: How to teach your child to read from home using sight words.

To watch more videos on how to teach your child to read and spell from home join my Youtube channel here:

Kind Regards,

Liz Dunoon