Importance and use of Phonics for children

Phonics is a method of teaching reading to the students. It is done by learning the sounds that a group of the letters makes when spoken. Teaching kid phonics is correlating the relationship between sound and letters. However, the link doesn’t work so well sometimes considering the cases of silent letter and accents. The teachers know how to teach phonics to the kid in a more straightforward way. There are several premium English learning colleges which teach the kids phonics straightforwardly and adequately.

At the age of 5, kids can be taught phonics. At home, parents can teach their children how to pronounce all 26 alphabets. Then parents can teach their children how to pair up each consonant with each vowel.

There are steps how to teach phonics to your kid. They are as follows:

• The parents need to teach their child how to pronounce two-letter combinations with a consonant and a vowel. Such as ‘la’, ‘le’, ‘li’, ‘lo’, ‘lu’, ‘sa’, ‘pa’, ‘ga, ‘ma’, ‘da’ etc. These are known as phonemes. They are also known as the smallest unit of sound.  

• It takes a little time for the children to grasp the concept of pronouncing the combinations of consonants and letters. After that parents can teach children how to pronounce the words starting with a consonant and ending with ‘ea.’ These combinations form complete words like ‘sea,’ ‘tea,’ ‘pea.’ These are methods of teaching pronunciations of basic words to your child.

• When your child is ready with the three lettered word pronunciations, you can teach them how to add sound at the end of each word. Parents can use four letter words in this purpose and format goes like consonant + vowel+ vowel+ consonant. The few given examples are ‘pear’, ‘tear’, ‘hour’, ‘bear’, ‘sour’, ‘dear’ etc. At this point, parents should teach their children how to break the words into logical syllable structure. Practice will make a kid better at learning phonics and will make them able to recognize the syllable structure of new words.

• Parents can start teaching them short paragraphs instead of single words. The most common syllables one can recognize easily are as follows:

1. Words ending with ‘ist.’
2. Words ending with ‘er’ and ‘ers.’
3. Words ending with ‘cles’ & ‘les.’
4. Consonant + vowel pairs.
5. Consonant + constant + ‘ou’.

These are the ways of how to teach phonics to your kid at home. Parents must encourage their children to learn and develop the English language as it can prove to be a valuable skill in an individual’s arsenal.