Amazing Tips to Prepare Your Child for Learning Phonics
As you know, phonics is a teaching method based on the relationships of sounds to the letters we use to pronounce them. Children who master phonics learn to identify individual sounds and how to combine them together to read words.
If you are planning to enroll your child to a children phonics school Singapore, you may have to prepare your child a little so that she won’t find any difficulty in learning phonics.
Make Flashcards
Buy or create a set of flashcards for each letter, each of which may contain capital letter, lowercase letter or both. You’ll have to use them to practice recognition of letter and its corresponding sound.
Shuffle these cards in a random order. Show one card at a time to the child and ask him to pronounce the letter. Then ask your child to produce the sound of that letter.
Make sure you offer additional guidance as required for letters that produce more than one sound. E.g. tell her how “c” in “cat” and “c” in “circle” make different sounds.
As your child gets more practice, she will be ready to recognize letter patterns i.e. two letters combined to produce one sound.
Introduce new flashcards that have common letter patterns, like pairs of vowels, such as ea, ai, oa, ee and diagraphs like th, sh, wh and ch.
Add Picture Cards
Now introduce cards with letters combined with pictures to build letter-sound matches further. Ask your child sort picture cards based on their beginning sound. The cards should have at least one picture that begins with every letter of the alphabets.
Provide multiple picture cards that have common word-starting letters. Make sure the child can easily identify the pictures. E.g. fish is a better option than fungus or futon.
Now choose a group of picture cards to start the exercise. Select a set with three initial consonant sounds that are very different like b, r and p. Review the cards before you ask your child to sort them by starting sound.
E.g. the picture could represent: bean, rope, pram, bat, ring, parrot, boat, plum, road.
Ask questions like: “What is the first sound you hear in the word bean? Which letter makes the ‘b’ sound? Is it the letter b, r or p?
Next, ask your child to sort the cards based on their ending sounds. But do this after ample practice of sorting pictures by starting sounds. Ask similar questions, such as “What last sound you heard in the word frog?”
If you prepare your child in this way, she won’t have any difficulty in the school and she’ll be happy to learn. And that’s what you want, right?
