Learning to read, initially, has two components: knowledge: learning the graphemes and the sounds they represent skills: learning to blend sounds into words and segment sounds for spelling. Many teachers offer lots of fun ways to learn graphemes. They do this in step-by-step progression, starting from the simple graphemes and progressing to the more-complex ones. […]
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Why are children still guessing and not decoding?
Reports are coming back from schools that, despite Synthetic Phonics being taught in Reception classes, many children are failing to learn to decode. This has been reflected in the results of the Year 1 Phonics Check, with 58% of children reading 32 out of 40 words correctly. Why is this happening?
Read MoreWhy the ‘A, B, C’ song is not helpful to beginner readers
Many young children learn to sing the ‘A, B, C’ song in nursery or at home. This song teaches them the names and the order of the letters of the alphabet. It’s a great way to store the alphabetic order of letters in our long-term memories. I still use the alphabet song when using a […]
Read MoreWhat is a phoneme?
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.
Read MoreTricky adjacent consonants
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 […]
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