Being concerned about children’s education is natural for parents, and we often want to know more about how to give extra reading help for kids. Of the many option available a lot of research in the area points to guided reading as being a very effective method. What is guided reading? Simply it is reading along with your child and jumping in where they are having difficulty with a particular word or phrase. By doing this the child will hear sounds and associate these to words they are seeing on the page. To supercharge this process it is widely acknowledged that the number one method is to learn to read with phonics.
Phonics programs utilise a particular teaching system that enables children learn the sounds that letters and combinations of letters make, and to blend those sounds to form words; subsequently children can use those learned sounds to ‘decode’ words that they do not know. The phonics system is extraordinary, because it teaches children the sounds of letters and words. By helping your child to learn the characteristic sounds made by particular vowels and consonants and combinations of the two, you enable the child to break down the sounds of words and pronounce words they have never come across before. This process is equally effective for intermediate readers can take advantage of phonics in the same way that beginners can. In some cases even quite advanced readers can use phonics to further improve their readings skills by using the more complex combinations of letters that can be found at advanced reading levels.
What is the best option for you if you want to teach your child to read with phonics? There are text based programs that use books, if you choose these you need to ensure that the books are pitched at the right level for your child and that the material is appropriate for their age group.Perhaps a better and more flexible option is to use one of the internet based phonics programs now available, and there are many such products around these days. Online resources often have a more diverse library of materials that can be selected for your child’s particular needs.
Pictures often feature heavily in phonics teaching and are used to provide clues to the sounds. If the story is about a dog you will see pictures of dogs so that the child thinks of the sound of the word ‘dog’ whenever they see one.
With the ready availability of phonics teaching programs on the internet and in stores, a number of parents are opting to use them to teach their children English. The phonics method does not stop after a child starts speaking some sentences fluently, but continues even after that. In fact because of the vast complexity of the English language, some people learn the correct pronunciation of a word very late in life.
It is the meaning of words that is important , and that is what the phonics system also teaches. It is for this reason that governments and schools around the world have mandated the use of phonics systems, and this is often called ’synthetic’ phonics, and is now proven to be the best method to provide reading help for kids.
Learn more about the best reading help for kids. Stop by Angela Kind’s site where you can find out all about how to Learn To Read With Phonics and what it can do for you.
