Homeschool Curriculum – Teaching Phonics

Essentially teaching phonics ties together the sounds of the alphabet and their spellings. The reach of phonics instruction is to teach the child the most common of the sound and the spelling of relationship.

When working with children for the first time you will look for the child’s reading readiness skills and how they relate the sounds of the alphabet to the spelling of the words.

In other words, the knowledge of the alphabet itself, recognizing the letter symbols, and the phonetic sounds the letter makes, and some of the more common combinations of letters and phonetic sounds.

This is a very important first step in determining the child’s awareness. There are many ways you as a parent can instill and improve this skill in your child and have great fun while teaching phonics for children.

There are some excellent packaged phonics instruction for your child available.

Also, with a little creativity, your child will have great fun learning phonics. Just about any activity that involves matching a letter of the alphabet is good practice for your child. Have the child cut out some of their favorite pictures from magazines such as Zoobooks Magazine for Kids. Then, have them cut out matching letters that the picture begins with. Use upper and lower case letters as your child begins to master the alphabet letter and phonic sound recognition.

You can also reverse this process by having cut-outs of all the letters of the alphabet and have your child randomly draw one then have to find a picture of something that begins with the letter they just picked out.

Using the same basic premise an around the house scavenger hunt is also a great learning tool for phonics learning. Riding in the car is also a great vehicle (sorry… couldn’t help it) for teaching phonics to your child. As you take care of your errands around town point to many of the objects and encourage your child to tell you what they are and what letter they begin with.

These exercises are great fun! In fact, I would guess that you may already have used this type of teaching phonics or even something similar and didn’t even realize you were already getting a head start on teaching your child to read using phonics!