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What is Phonics? An Introduction for Parents and Educators

phonicsorg on February 7, 2024

Anyone who can read and write in an alphabetical language has mastered an important set of skills. They know the connection between letters and the sounds each one represents. They can decipher letter and word combinations when reading and encode which sequence of letters to spell when writing. Understanding these letter-to-sound principles is one of the most important aspects of literacy; a precious ability of human communication.

If you’re reading this, congratulations! You’ve already mastered these skills in English. You likely learned them through phonics instruction, although you may not remember how.

If you’re an educator or parent who’s helping a child learn to read, you might find yourself wondering: what is phonics? And how should I be teaching it?

In this guide, we’ll refresh your memory and explore what phonics instruction is meant to be.

Phonics and the Reading Pyramid

Phonics is one of the foundational pillars of the reading pyramid. Once children understand the sounds of their language and how to verbally manipulate words (phonemic awareness), they can gradually move up the pyramid.

With continued instruction, they move up the pyramid to build fluency—the ability to read with ease, accuracy, and expression. As they grow in fluency, children build their vocabulary. Eventually, they develop all the essential reading skills and can experience reading comprehension with little adult guidance.

How Phonics Works

Phonics instruction builds knowledge about letter-sound correlations in reading and writing. It is simply, “the relationship between speech and print” (Beck, 2006, p.16). It is an umbrella term for several important skills children acquire through development and instruction.

Learning the Sounds of Language

Phonemic awareness, or the ability to hear, recognize, and manipulate the different sounds in language, develops in a child’s early years of life. It sets the foundation for spoken language.

The more that children develop and engage in literacy activities with family members, they develop pre-reading skills. They learn things like concepts of print, rhyming, several alphabetical letters, and more. Soon, they’ll be ready for phonics instruction to begin.

The Alphabetic Principle

Before kindergarten, children typically start learning the alphabetic principle. This is the understanding that words are made of letters. It’s the concept and practice of connecting letters with their corresponding sounds (otherwise known as a “grapheme-phoneme correspondence” or GPC). Children often learn the alphabet song and know that the letters make certain sounds, like the letter <m> representing the sound /m/. With early phonics instruction, they gradually learn, for example, that the letters <ch> make the /ch/ sound as in ‘chocolate’ and /th/ is the beginning sound of the word, “thanks.”

Blending Letter Sounds to Form Words (Decoding)

The more grapheme-phoneme correspondences a child knows, the more they can practice blending. Phoneme blending is combining individual letter sounds in a word to read the whole word. This can also be called sounding out or decoding. During instruction, a child might come across a new word. The child can blend the sounds such as /m/ /a/ /t/ to read the whole word, ‘mat’.

Segmenting Words into Letters (Spelling/Encoding)

Inversely, children learn segmenting in phonics instruction, which is the opposite of blending. Kids learn early spelling techniques when they can spell their names, loved ones’ names, and simple words based on the individual sounds that make up a word. For example, if a child wants to spell ‘skip’ but doesn’t know how, they can gradually segment the word into its individual phonemes from start to finish: /s/ /k/ /i/ /p/.

Types of Phonics Instruction and Their Efficacy

There are four different types of phonics. Any phonics instruction for early readers is better than no phonics instruction at all. However, some methods do have more efficacious results than others.

Regardless of the approach in the type of phonics, instruction should be explicit and systematic. This means determining a pre-established sequence or “scope and sequence” to directly teach phonics concepts. In this way, children can start learning with easier concepts and slowly increase complexity in different stages.

Synthetic Phonics

Synthetic phonics teaches the association of individual language sounds (phonemes) to alphabetical letters (graphemes). Then, learners are explicitly taught to “sound out” each letter and then blend the sounds to form the whole word. For example: the letter sounds /s/ /a/ /t/ are blended to decode the word ‘sat’.

There is research-based evidence that synthetic phonics is the most efficacious type of phonics to use when teaching children to learn to read. Moore (2021) says, “It is sensible to employ an approach that makes the systematic instruction and revision of sound-spelling correspondences most comprehensible for both teachers and students. Synthetic phonics offers the simplest way to achieve this” (p. 24).

Analogy Phonics

Analogy phonics is a top-down approach. This means the instruction starts with whole words instead of individual sounds. In analogy phonics, common “word families” or “rimes” are used to

learn words instead of blending individual letter sounds. It starts with a word a child already knows (sat), breaks them down into the onset and rime (s-at, c-at), and then introduces similar words in that pattern (mat, fat, rat, pat, etc.).

Analytic Phonics

Also known as implicit phonics, analytic phonics teaches kids to process a new word by “analyzing” its parts (phonograms) and relating them to previously learned words. For example, a child may know the words cat, sad, ran, and mat. When presented with the new word, rat, they must sift through what they know— c/at/ + m/at/ + /r/an— to conclude /r/ + –at is ‘rat’.

An analytic phonics approach may not be effective for all children. Typically children perform better on reading and spelling with a synthetic phonics approach.

Embedded Phonics

The embedded, or incidental, phonics method provides reading instruction using whole texts. It is based on a theory of reading instruction called “whole language.” Instead of teaching explicit, systematic phonics skills, it requires opportunistic learning through practices like sight words (the, it, and, was, etc.) and context clues (words, letters, or pictures that hint at meanings or other words in the sentence).

Embedded phonics practices are often considered “real world” reading but can hinder a child’s decoding skills, which are essential for reading new words. Relying on context clues is considered a bad habit as it can stunt overall literacy development.

Phonics, Explained Simple Enough for a Child to Understand

Reading is like a fun treasure hunt. You can explore all sorts of stories and ideas to find the golden nuggets you’re looking for, and sometimes, discover amazing prizes you never imagined. This treasure hunt happens in the world of words, where endless adventures of learning and imagination live.

But when children first enter the world of words, they don’t know where to go. Everything looks squiggly and confusing because this world is made of secret codes. These secret codes are letters of the alphabet.

The first adventure is to learn to crack the code, which is what phonics teaches. Every letter makes a special sound; many of them you already know how to speak. Every time you learn a new letter and the sounds it makes, you crack another piece of the code.

As you learn more of these letters and their sounds, you’ll be able to decode words. Soon, the world of words will come to life and you’ll collect many treasures as you explore. With practice, you can enjoy new and exciting treasure hunts for life.

Resources to Help a Child Learn Phonics

There are countless phonics programs available today. But like the different phonics instruction methods, not all programs are the same or offer the best results.

To help you decide which phonics programs might help your child learn, phonics.org offers:

Educational articles and guides: Gain a deeper understanding of phonics principles, teaching strategies, and best practices.
Phonics program reviews: Compare expert-reviewed assessments of popular phonics curricula to help you make an informed decision.
Fun phonics activities and games: Browse the top resources that make learning phonics fun and interactive.

Whether you’re teaching your child at home or a group of students in a classroom, there are affordable, effective phonics programs to help their learning process. Explore the resources at phonics.org to find the right one!

Have a phonics program or app you’d like us to review? Reach out to us at [email protected] to let us know.

Classroom Phonemic Awareness Activities for Kids

phonicsorg on February 7, 2024

Before learning to read, children must understand their spoken language. The first step in understanding spoken language is becoming aware of the different sounds that words contain within that language.

This is called phonemic awareness—one of the most important concepts in early literacy education.

To help young learners achieve necessary milestones on their way to reading readiness, an understanding of phonemic awareness is crucial.

Whether you’re new to this concept or simply want a refresher, here’s an overview of phonemic awareness for phonics instruction. We’ll also share some fun classroom activities that improve this important skill!

Phonemic Awareness: The Building Blocks of Phonics

Young children inherently learn that spoken language is made up of verbal sounds. As they build phonemic awareness during their first years of development, children learn many individual sounds that can be combined to form specific words.

Building on this awareness, children begin to learn what certain words mean and then gradually use learned words to express themselves and communicate.

Children build phonemic awareness over time in the presence of fluent adults and family. While language development happens naturally for most children, the phonics skills required for reading and writing must be explicitly taught.

Therefore, phonemic awareness is the foundation of the reading pyramid:

There are proven activities that educators and parents can use to support phonemic development.

Activities to Strengthen Phonemic Awareness in Phonics Education

While phonemic awareness starts in early childhood development, direct instruction (and lots of practice) helps kids apply these skills toward phonics learning.

Some children start learning phonics as early as three years old. Many, however, start learning once they enter kindergarten. Whether your little learner is in daycare, preschool, or kindergarten, you can give these activities a try!

1. Rhyme Scavenger Hunt

Rhyming is a crucial skill when it comes to phonemic awareness. To help kids identify and come up with words that rhyme, have a “rhyme” scavenger hunt.

Create a list of classroom items you’ll use in the scavenger hunt.
Come up with words that rhyme with each item. These words will be the students’ scavenger hunt clues.
Share the rhyming clue out loud then have students guess the answer. Let them get up, walk around, and physically “hunt” for the item they think rhymes with the clue.
Every time students identify the correct item, have them raise their hands to guess what other words rhyme with it.
You can also play this fun activity outdoors for an added challenge.

2. Sort Out the Sound

Engaging kids in sound sorting is an effective phonemic awareness activity. This helps them identify beginning, middle, and end sounds.

Give students a sheet of paper that has pictures of different objects such as dog, duck, pig, pale, rock, and sock.
Let students cut out each item.
Instruct students to sort their cutouts based on the sounds you say. For example: “the beginning sound is /d/” or “the ending sound is /ck/”.
Review students’ guesses and correct them when necessary.
Repeat until all the sounds have been sorted.

3. Clapping Through Syllables

For syllable awareness, you can have children use their bodies to emphasize how many syllables a word has.

Have students respond to words you say by clapping their hands for each syllable in each word.
Repeat each word several times as a class, changing the speed from slow to fast.
You can also change it up with stomping, jumping, or dancing.

4. Letter Mystery Bag

Help your students practice sound placement with this fun, interactive mystery bag!

Place a bunch of toy letters in a bag. They can be foam, plastic, or wood.
Have each student take turns reaching into the bag without looking. Whichever letter they pull out, ask them to make the sound that letter makes.
Then, have the whole group repeat the letter sound.
You can also have students pull out multiple letters in a row and see if the class can make a word from those letters.

5. Head-to-Toe Word Syllables

Get some movement in while practicing word segmentation for phonemic awareness.

Explain and demonstrate the activity: students will touch parts of their bodies to show parts of a word.
Beginning sounds = head.
Middle sounds = hips.
End sounds = toes.
Say a word, such as “popsicle.”
Have students repeat the word as they break up its syllables head to toe.
For “popsicle,” children touch their heads for /pop/, their hips for /sih/, and their toes for /cull/.

6. Guess the Rhyme I’m Thinking Of

Have the class guess which rhyming word you’re thinking of.

Give the class a rhyming clue: “I’m thinking of a word that rhymes with cat.”
Let students guess the rhyming word, popcorn style.
Feel free to use nonsense words for fun! For example: “I’m thinking of a word that rhymes with zoodle!” for the word “noodle.”

7. Make Sounds in a Mirror

For young children, making words in a mirror can be a fun activity at any time of day.

Place a small mirror in front of the child.
Ask them if they can repeat a word while making the funniest, most dramatic pronunciations with their face. Show them an example to begin with.
Talk about what the tongue and lips are doing while making a certain sound.
Have fun being goofy together and watching how words are formed!

8. Tongue Twisters

Tongue twisters are a classic way to get kids thinking about phonemes and pronunciation.

Find skills-appropriate tongue twisters to try with the class.
Practice each one through “repeat after me,” call and response, and recite from memory.
Use this list of tongue twisters for plenty of ideas.

9. Sound Monsters

Make phonemes so playful that kids look forward to practicing every day. The sound-eating monster is a classroom favorite.

Make several cute monsters using shoe boxes (for the body and mouth) and craft supplies (for the eyes, spikes, and facial features).
Explain how the Sound Monsters need to be fed every day. Sometimes the monsters have an appetite for different types of sounds, so the class needs to be careful which sounds in words they choose!
Each day, get the class excited to “feed” the monsters. Rotate which students get to feed them so everyone has a turn throughout the week.
Provide a bunch of notecards with pictures or words, such as baby, ball, apple, frog, etc.
Choose which sounds a specific monster wants that day and act it out for the class. “Today, this Word Monster wants to eat the sound, ahhh.”
Have students select notecards that contain words or pictures with the correct sounds.
Make it fun and mix up the phonemes to make it challenging: “Today, this monster wants to eat the beginning sounds shh and sss.”

10. Simon Says Blending

Phoneme blending is one of the most important phonemic awareness skills students can have when learning to read.

Tell the class you will play Simon Says, a game where the teacher asks students to do an action, but only if they hear “Simon Says” first.
Instead of saying the action word, say all of the sounds in the word and ask students to blend the sounds to figure out the action. For example, “Simon says /s/ /i/ /t/ down” or “Simon says /j/ /u/ /m/ /p/ up!”
Mix up the gameplay by asking one of the students to be the new “Simon”.

Classroom Reading and Phonics Apps

Using technology in the classroom is helpful for digital native learners. In addition to these fun group activities, consider classroom reading and phonics apps that include phonemic awareness exercises.

Explore phonics.org to learn more ways to strengthen your students’ phonemic awareness. Find some of the best early phonics programs on the market today!