What IS Phonics? Adding Phonics into Their Lessons
To ensure that your students are quickly becoming fluent readers, let’s move into the phonics portion of Phonetic Reading with Silent Elephant “e”.
In Part 1, students thoroughly explore phonemic awareness. They are guided to take their first steps to understand how sounds form words in our language.
Upon completion of Lesson 4D in Part 1, Phonemic Awareness, I usually feel confident that children know that an individual sound is represented by a colored square on the game board and that words are made up of individual sounds quickly and smoothly blended together.
While working in Part 1 Phonemic Awareness, children naturally begin to connect individual sounds with the letter symbols and letter names that they are learning in other parts of their school day and that they have been seeing in the books you read to them and the games you play with them.
They successfully and confidently make the sound/symbol connection between phonemic awareness and phonics. They know the letters and sounds work together in our written language.
They are now ready to begin their exploration into phonics.
It is important to note that for every learner phonics must follow phonemic awareness.
So, you ask, just exactly what is phonics?
Phonics is the relation between specific, printed letters and letter combinations with their specific sound(s) and the combining of those sounds into meaning that corresponds with our spoken language.
It’s essential that all learners have direct, precise, methodical instruction in phonics—sound/symbol relationship to ensure their success as a fluent reader.
Phonics instruction instills within each child an understanding of how words are formed by putting sound/symbol pieces together like a jigsaw puzzle.
These predictable patterns in words need to be discovered through explicit and systematic lessons and internalized by the learner.
There was a time when some educators decided phonics was not important, so they choose to teach reading using sight and/or whole language methods. This meant that students had to memorize EVERY word in order to read. Can you imagine? What a daunting task!
Students were not provided with the logical “tools” to help them figure out a word they had never seen before. If they hadn’t memorized the word “psychologist”, they were left trying to discover the word through context clues.
If context clues didn’t help, the word was a loss to them causing their comprehension to suffer.
Obviously, sight reading and/or whole language reading methods made reading extremely difficult.
Thankfully, current research in reading shows that phonics is vital for all learners. ALL LEARNERS must have consistent, precise, methodical, explicit phonics instruction—especially struggling learners and those with learning differences.
Those past sight method educators had the mistaken belief that phonics instruction was unnecessary. They believed that there are more exceptions to the rules than words that follow the rules in English.
HOWEVER, this is NOT true! Even though English is a rich mixture of many languages, it is predictable.
These are the “Facts about English Predictability”* that make English perfect for phonics instruction:
· Fifty percent of English words are decoded and spelled accurately by the simple sound-symbol correspondence rule alone, as in “c-a-t”.
· Thirty-six percent more are spelled with only one contradiction to the simple sound-symbol correspondence rule. This 36% becomes truly decodable and “spellable” when readers know ALL of the phonics rules taught in Phonetic Reading with Silent Elephant “e”, such as the schwa rules as in “calendar”.
· Ten percent more are decoded and spelled accurately when word meaning, origin, and morphology are considered and taught as in Silent Elephant “e”, for example “chandelier”.
· This leaves fewer than 4% of words in English that don’t fit any rule, as in “of”. Words’ pronunciations have morphed through time and now need to be memorized using the unique sight word instruction provided in Silent Elephant “e”, Part 2.
This predictability is why teaching phonics with Silent Elephant “e” gives all learners the tools needed to decode words. It instills confidence within them that no matter what word they encounter, they are ready for it. When they see “psychologist” for the first time, they have the necessary tools to decode the word thus ensuring their comprehension will remain solid.
Now that you know English is predictable, which makes phonics the best way to teach reading skills, and that your student(s) have a growing knowledge of phonemic awareness, are you excited to begin teaching phonics? Are you thinking, “What’s next?”
When you believe a child is ready to begin making a guided transition to adding phonics to their daily lessons, start administering the multiple phonics assessments provided in Part 2 to determine their personal level of success in phonics.
After finding a child’s personal level of success in phonics, begin phonics instruction at their success level while continuing instruction in phonemic awareness. Provide instruction in both phonemic awareness and phonics until a child has completed all phonemic awareness lessons in Part 1 and shown mastery in the phonemic awareness assessments in Part 2.
In my next blog post, I will share with you the content and format of the amazing phonics portion of Phonetic Reading with Silent Elephant “e”.
P.S. *The “Facts about English Predictability” information originated from Speech to Print by Louisa Cook Moats, Paul H. Brookes Publishing Co. 2010, p. 110.
If you have further questions about phonemic awareness, feel free to contact us.