This is a guest blog written by Emily Hanson, former class teacher and freelance education copywriter. She holds a PGCE and M.Ed from the University of Cambridge, and has taught across the primary age range. Her subject specialism is literature, language and phonics. Outside of the classroom, Emily has also worked for a youth charity, […]
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In our ‘what is…’ series we’re taking things back to basics! From phonics to decoding, blending and more, we’re going to break things down and give you our expert advice on each area, to help answer any questions you may have around teaching reading. *** When we read a new word, we need to be […]
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What do we mean by ‘sound it out’ and what does it entail? When a child gets stuck on a word we often remind them to ‘sound it out’. As fluent readers, we assume this is very straightforward. We recognise these words automatically and skip all the stages that beginner readers need to go through […]
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Although systematic, synthetic phonics teaching programmes are now a mandatory part of the UK National Curriculum for schools, one of the questions we are most frequently asked is still, ‘What are decodable books?’. Phonic Books co-founder, Tami Reis-Frankfort, provides a brief clarification of the meaning of the term, and explains why decodable books are so […]
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Some years back I worked as a dyslexia specialist in a secondary school. I often had to seek out my students who were attending other lessons. The approach was they they couldn’t be withdrawn from their lessons as they had a right to access the curriculum. Now, these were struggling readers and I always wondered […]
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Have you heard of a phonics approach called ‘Speech to Print’? Another name for it is ‘Linguistic Phonics’. This approach is used in a number of programmes: Sounds Write, EBLI and Reading Simplified. The Speech to Print approach starts from the sounds in words (phonemes) and not the spellings (letters or spelling patterns). It follows […]
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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 […]
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