Brown Book Loft Blog

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.

To help your child learn to read with phonics there are a number of options available to you. Firstly you could use phonics books that set out specific programmes for reading using phonics. In this case you need to make sure that the books you select are at the right level for your child to match their reading ability, but also ensure that the material is appropriate for them and will keep their interest. Increasingly in the modern world parents are now turning to the internet to find online resources when trying to get reading help for kids. There are now available many online resources that teach the phonics reading system. Online resources can have the advantage of being able to offer a wider range of phonics teaching material that can be more closely tailored to the needs of a particular child.

The majority of phonics reading programmes will also use pictures to illustrate the stories. For example if you are reading a phonics story about a cat to your child, there would be pictures of cats around the text to help the child to associate the word ‘cat’ with a picture of a cat.

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.

Looking to find the best deal on reading help for kids, then visit www.learntoreadwithphonics.org to find the best advice on how to Learn To Read With Phonics for you.