Learning+to+read+and+phonics

Learning to read is not always easy for children, and some children take longer than others. Very early on children begin to develop the skills needed to read and write.They become familiar with certain signs and symbols and soon enough learn to communicate. However, a childs ability to communicate does not always mean they will be quick at learning to read. Therefore, it is important for parents and guardians to become fully involved in encouraging their children to be observant and aware of the different forms of literacy that are around. It is equally important for teachers to encourage and challenge their students and to be active in harnessing their students interests and developing structured teaching time to further grow their knowledge.

In her book, //Developing Early Literacy//, Susan Hill lists the different phases of development in regards to learning to read (and write) These phases include:
 * Beginning - at this stage babies, infants and toddlers are interested in looking, touching, tasting, and smelling books, catalogues and magazines. It is all about exploring and experiencing something new.
 * Early- emergent - at this stage children are more likely to join in with the reader, especially in their favourite parts.' By age 3 they will have heard over 1000 stories' ( Hill 2006)
 * Emergent - at this stage, a child is beginning to understand the concept of word, they start to read words aloud. They begin to self- correct when they know a word does not make sense.
 * Early - at this stage, the concept of directionality is well under control, a child knows that you read left to right and from top to bottom. The child is now able to write simple sentences using common forms of punctuation.
 * Transitional - at this stage a child is beginning to fine tune their reading and writing skills." They have built up fluency when reading aloud, and chunk the words in phrases together, rather than reading word by word"( Hill 2006 )
 * Extending - at this stage, a child can write quite extensively and experiment with different text type. They have become familiar with revising and editing, they reread what they have written to make sure that it flows.

HOW DOES PHONICS RELATE TO READING?
Phonics is a strategy used to learn how to read and write, which focuses on the fact that spoken language is made up of sounds. Although there are 26 letters in the English alphabet, there are approximately 44 different phonemes (sounds) that are in our everyday language, which students need to learn. Therefore, the approach needed to teach phonics is to identify the combination of graphemes (letters) needed to make these sounds. There are different stages involded with the development of phonics, below are some examples:

Stage 1: Letters of the alphabet The first step that a student will need to process is the way to name and write the letters of the alphabet. Once this has been mastered the student will need to learn that the alphabet consists of consonants and vowels.

Consonants are the letters that use restricted airflow by using lips, teeth, tongue or palate to form them. Consonants can be found at the beginning, middle and end of words, for example, radar. Some consonants can represent more than one sound such as the letter ‘c’, which has a soft /s/ in cereal and a hard sound in cat.

Vowels are the letters that have unrestricted airflow and contact between the lips, teeth, tongue and palate. Similar to consonants, vowels represent different sounds in words such as the letter ‘a’, which has a short sound in apple and a long sound in lane.

Stage 3: Blends Blends, or letter clusters, are when two or more consonants are combined at the beginning or end of a word such as, splash or blend. ‘The maximum number of consonants at the beginning of a syllable is three and the third letter is always ‘r’ or ‘l’, as in splurge and scream (hill 2006). There are only three consonant blends that occur regularly as initial and final blends: • ‘sp’ representing /sp/ in spill and wasp • ‘sc’ or ‘sk’ representing /sk/ in scan and mask • ‘st’ representing /st/ in street and east