Synthetic Phonics programmes now talk of ‘consonant blends’ or ‘adjacent consonants’, but what are they? Why is it that the letters ‘bl’ in the word ‘black’ are adjacent consonants while ‘ck’ are not? Speech and language therapist, Hema Desai explains the difference and suggests fun, multisensory activities to embed learning. As a speech and language […]
Read More
Of all the strategies used for teaching reading, I believe that word-building is the most powerful. Why is that? Word-building incorporates two fundamental skills in learning to read: as children build a word, they learn to segment and blend. When we ask children to build a word, e.g., ‘map’ they need to segment the phonemes […]
Read More
Ann Sullivan of Phonics for Pupils with Special Educational Needs is an experienced SEND teacher, who has created her own phonics programme specifically for SEND children. This is what she has to say about our latest set of Books: Moon Dogs Extras for Catch-Up Readers. If there is one question I am asked more than […]
Read More
Here at Phonic Books we have been publishing decodable books for beginner and catch-up readers for seventeen years. During those years we attended many conferences and education shows. When discussing whether our books were suited to students with SEND, we always deferred to the teachers working in SEND settings. While we were confident teaching dyslexic […]
Read More
The split digraphs ‘a-e’, ‘e-e’, ‘i-e’, ‘o-e’, ‘u-e’ are very common spellings. They have different names: Silent e, Magic e, Vowel Consonant e, Bossy e, Split digraphs. Many children struggle to read words with these spelling patterns, so we need to teach them explicitly. Why do we have these spelling patterns in English? The ‘e’ […]
Read More
Here we are in the last term of school and soon the summer will be upon us. It is really important that during this summer, the ‘summer slump’ of learning loss will not add to the learning loss that has already impacted so many children during the last two years. A good way to prevent […]
Read More
What are homophones? Homophones are words that sound the same but have different meanings. The word ‘homophone’ has a Greek origin: ‘Homo’ meaning ‘same’ and ‘phone’ meaning ‘sound’. So, the word ‘homophone’ means same-sounding words that have different meanings. Some homophones have the same spellings: for example, the words ‘row’ as in ‘to row a […]
Read More
When I trained to be a teacher in one of the best universities in London, I learned a great deal about the wonderful world of books, how to select quality picture books and spot racially biased books, and even how to make books by stitching them together by hand. We made book covers using potato […]
Read More
Scaffolding the teaching of multisyllabic words – simple to complex Many teachers are focused on teaching children how to sound out graphemes (spellings) and blend sounds together into words. They will even be teaching children how to manipulate phonemes in phonemic awareness activities. These are all essential underlying skills necessary for learning to read. These activities […]
Read More
Often when I read with a pupil, I need to remind her/him (and myself) to point to the words. As fluent readers we don’t point to words on the page, but sometimes if we come across a difficult or new word we are trying to work out – we will use our finger to work […]
Read More
