Phonemic Awareness is the strongest predictor of reading and spelling success. The schools who achieve incredible reading results are often those that have honed their student’s phonemic awareness skills. This blog post explores what phonemic awareness is, and how it sits alongside phonics. It also provides teaching ideas to incorporate it into your lessons.
As adults it feels like we learn to read by sight, but it’s a lot more complex than that. Guest blogger, Marnie Ginsberg, explains the most compelling and well-researched theory of how learners acquire the ability to read English words. It’s not just what we ‘see’ on the surface!
Tricky words, like ‘the’ and ‘was’, often trip up teachers and students with their rare spelling choices. Shirley Houston explains tricky words, the steps to teach them systematically and explicitly, and offers ideas and free resources to put this into practice.
High levels of engagement and using Phonics Hero continuously throughout the year are the key to success. Account Manager, Michelle Haines, takes you through her top tips on how you can ensure everyone is using, loving and achieving fantastic results with Phonics Hero.
How do you teach a child to read at home? After creating Phonics Hero, the pressure was on for our CEO, Katherine, when it was time to teach her own child to read!
Katherine takes parents through her personal journey of teaching her daughter how to read. She describes how she applied the 5 critical steps: rhyming, introducing sounds, oral blending, using phonics to read the first words and finally, practising to make perfect!
Blending is a crucial skill that every child needs to start reading unknown words. If a child can’t blend – they are going to struggle with reading. Teacher Santina explains blending, how to teach it and how to support children for whom the blending penny is not dropping.
Decodable books/readers are a firm favourite in the UK and are slowly inching their way into Australian and US classrooms. Primary school teacher and phonics trainer, Santina DiMauro, gives teachers a step-by-step guide on how to use decodable books in the classroom.
Even with all the enthusiasm in the world, if you don’t know the fundamentals of synthetic phonics, you will trip yourself, and more importantly your child, up in learning to read. Our CEO takes parents through what they need to know to support their child. Look out for the free PowerPoint for teachers to use.
Teacher Shirley Houston, takes you through how to build the ultimate phonics lesson plan: effective practices, step-by-step instructions and a free template to take your phonics lesson to greatness!
Vowel teams are probably the most common source of reading and spelling errors as one vowel sound may be represented by as many as 6 different vowel teams. Teacher Shirley Houston breaks down the vowel teams and how to teach them!
