Phonics

A simple way of describing phonics is that words are made up of sounds (PA) and letters represent those sounds. When addressing phonics, students begin by learning the 26 letters of the alphabet and their sounds. Since there are 44 phonemes or sounds, and only 26 letters, we deal with the extra phonemes by combining letters to represent sounds. This is an oversimplification, but it makes sense to students and helps them to understand the code of our English language how words are put together.

When children learn to read by matching sounds to letters and begin to decode, we often say they have “broken the code,” because they have made the connection that those little marks on the page, which represent sounds, can be combined to match the words that we speak, and that’s really what reading is all about. A grade one colleague shared with us that a student exclaimed, “The letters are talking,” when they realized that the letters matched the words they spoke.

While some children may learn to read with broad literacy instruction, a deep understanding of how our language is put together comes from explicit instruction in phonics. Reading and writing are linguistic work, as students are learning the English language system.