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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Top tips for teaching phonics
Teach step-by-step You don’t need to teach the whole alphabet to get reading going. Start with just a few letters, and get children to build words from them. Phonic Books starts with ‘s’, ‘a’, ‘t’, ‘i’ and ‘m’. Work with word-building Word-building is the best way to teach reading and spelling. Write letters on cards […]
Read MoreHow to teach reading and spelling with the Smart Chute
It is really important to teach reading and spelling together so that children can see that reading is decoding letters into sounds and spelling is encoding sounds into letters. In short, they are reverse activities. This way children learn how the English language alphabetic code actually works. It also means that from the beginning, children […]
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