Approaches to Teaching Reading - Page 23 of 23

What is a phoneme?

Posted on 17th January 201121st May 2024 in Synthetic Phonics and tagged blending, consonant digraph, digraphs, explain phoneme, high-frequency words, igh, phoneme definition, segmenting, trigraphs, vowel digraph, what are adjacent consonants?, what is a consonant digraph?, what is a digraph?, what is a grapheme, what is a phoneme?, what is a trigraph?, what is a vowel digraph?, what is blending?5 Comments

Now 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.

Teaching high-frequency words and phonics – two conflicting approaches?

Posted on 20th December 201031st May 2024 in Approaches to Teaching Reading, High-Frequency Words and tagged article, beginner readers, decoding, decoding high frequency words, high-frequency words, how to teach high-frequency words, how to teach tricky words, shape words, tricky words, whole word reading of high frequency words1 Comment

Wouldn’t it be great if we could teach those high-frequency words strictly within the phonic progression of our programme?

In praise of old fashioned dictation

Posted on 24th October 201016th September 2016 in Approaches to Teaching Reading, Synthetic Phonics3 Comments

I used to believe that dictation was a boring old fashioned activity for teachers with no imagination. It was ideologically as far from the ‘child centred’ approach as one could get.

Tricky adjacent consonants

Posted on 4th October 201016th September 2016 in Reading Difficulties, Synthetic Phonics and tagged adjacent consonants, blending, blends, final blend, initial blendLeave a Comment

We 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 […]

Should beginner readers use ONLY decodable books?

Posted on 25th January 201016th September 2016 in Approaches to Teaching Reading, Decodable Books and tagged banding, decodable books, guessing, Phonics, visual memory12 Comments

Susan Godsland has posted a useful list of ten reasons why beginner readers should use only decodable books here (I have copied it in full below). What do you think?