Decodable reading books

Why are good decodable reading books so important for early readers?

Decodable reading books are books used in the early stages of teaching children to read with phonics. They contain only (or mainly) text that can be ‘decoded’ (or sounded out) based on the letter-sounds the child has already been taught. This encourages children to sound out words and blend sounds to read words, rather than guessing words from pictures or context.

This recent thread on Mumsnet is a good example of how frustrating it can be for children who are given the wrong sort of reading books when they are in the early stages of learning to read with phonics.

If a school is teaching a certain phonics programme such as Jolly Phonics, Read Write Inc., or Letters and Sounds, then in an ideal world the children would all be given decodable reading books that follow the same sequence as that particular scheme

Unfortunately, many schools still have large stocks of the Oxford Reading Tree ‘Biff and Chip’ style books. These use predictable, repetitive text with illustrations that are deliberately designed to provide clues to the text content. They also use many ‘sight words’ that cannot be decoded so the child who has been learning phonics gets very frustrated when presented with lots of words that contradict what they have been taught.

Children using these books soon develop a bad habit of guessing what the words might be rather than reading them. This may not be a problem whilst their reading books contain lots of pictures but eventually their memory for sight words will reach overload and if they haven’t learnt how to read the alphabetic code properly they will struggle to read more complex texts as they move on in school.

If your child brings home books that they are unable to read based on the phonic sounds they already know, the best advice is to share the book with them and help with any words they are unable to work out, to avoid them struggling and guessing words.

Interactive websites for children

There are many websites providing free interactive games and activities for children – some better than others! Here are some that I think are worth a visit:

Poisson Rouge
A treasure chest of activities for young children to explore – they can develop their ICT skills without the need to read any text or follow any instructions.
(For parents who want to understand what the site has to offer before allowing their child to roam it freely, there is a user guide – click on the Union Jack symbol at the bottom of the home page, then ‘User Guide’)

NGfL Cymru
This site has a useful page for seeing how to write letters correctly and hear the sounds. The first page has the letter names – click on the arrow on the bottom right of the page to go to the letter formation page.

Family Learning
A selection of links to free phonics games

Starfall
This is a popular site with many schools and parents (the American accent is not to everyone’s taste though).

BBC Words and Pictures
Games and activities that focus on a different areas of phonics work.

School websites
A number of schools have created their own websites – these are the best I have come across so far. I have linked to the Literacy pages but they also have lots of activities covering other areas of learning:

Woodlands Junior School,Kent

Northwood Primary School, Kent

If you come across another great website, or one of these links is broken, please add your comment.

Blending Sounds

Blending is one of the skills children need to develop when learning to read with phonics. They need to be able to look at the letters in a word, say the sounds (all through the word) and hear the word.

Blending needs practice – some children grasp the skill straight away and others can take much longer. The two main reasons why children struggle to hear the word when they have said the sounds are that they don’t know the letter sounds well enough (so they pause to think between letters) or the letter sounds are not being pronounced correctly.

If you are not sure how to pronounce the letter sounds correctly, take a look at our Hear the Sounds page on the website.

Children can start blending sounds into words as soon as they know a small group of letters well. The words chosen to start with will therefore depend on the letter-sounds already known. Jolly Phonics starts with the group of letters 's', 'a', 't', 'p', 'i', 'n' because they make more simple 3-letter words than any other group of six letters. Read Write Inc. starts with the group 'm', 'a', 's', 'd', 't'.

If your child knows the letter-sounds well but is finding it difficult to blend them to read words, there are a number of tactics you can try to help them:

*Using pictures or objects, ask your child to find the ‘c-a-t’ or ‘p-i-g’ for example – if they can put the spoken sounds together, they will eventually learn to do the same with written sounds.

*Try using Magnetic letters or letters on cards to make simple words.

*Start with 2-sound words like ‘is’, ‘in’, ‘it’ to gain confidence, then move on to simple 3-sound words (CVC words or consonant-vowel-consonant) such as ‘sit’, ‘pin’.

*If your child is adding ‘uh’ onto the consonant sounds, try getting them to whisper the sound as this tends to keep it ‘pure’ this will make it easier to hear the target word.

*Get your child to slide sounds together more quickly until they are literally saying the word.

* Use very simple decodable sentences or books – it may be that your child doesn’t understand why they are sounding out and blending - Decodable Reading Books

* Use finger tracking under the letters to read the word.

*Having a picture on the back of the word card is good so that the child can turn it over and see if they have read the word correctly.

*Make sure your child is reading the letter-sounds – not saying them and looking away trying to remember them. Also, make sure they are reading all through the word – not reading the first sound then guessing the rest.

A useful video showing how to blend sounds into words can be found on a great website Mr Thorne Does Phonics here

If you own an iPhone or iPod, then you might want to look at this great app called PocketPhonics. This makes the most of 21st century technology to provide an engaging and interactive way to help your child learn their letter sounds and how to blend them into words.

The thing to remember is that learning to blend will click eventually - if you have any other good suggestions for how you have helped your child learn to blend, do let us know!

How important is phonemic awareness?

What is phonemic awareness and how important is it when learning to read?

Phonemic awareness is the basis for learning phonics - it is the ability to identify individual sounds within words so that later on, the printed letters can be matched up with their proper sounds.

So phonemic awareness is not about asking children to name letters or know which letters represent which sounds – it is being aware of the sounds in spoken language.

There is some debate as to how important it is for children to have good phonemic awareness before being introduced to letters. General consensus is that whilst it is not a pre-requisite to learning to read, it is recognised that children who can hear phonemes in words and sound them out accurately are generally well prepared to make a good start in reading and writing.

Young children need to be given every opportunity for speaking and listening and lots of games to help develop phonemic awareness both before and whilst learning letter/sounds. This is an area where parents/carers can play such a vital role in their child’s development and give them the best preparation before formal phonics teaching begins in school.
• Tell stories as well as reading from books – this will encourage your child to listen.
• Play I-Spy
• Play lots of oral blending games –“It’s time for b-e-d”, “Could you go and fetch your c-oa-t”
• Sing lots of Nursery Rhymes
• Play rhyming word games such as rhyming bingo
• Play listening games

We have recently added some great new resources for developing speaking and listening - visit the website to find out.

You might also like to know that is not only children that can have difficulty with oral blending, as this very funny YouTube video shows!

5 years on...

Focus on Phonics was launched 5 years ago as a small, family run internet business. I thought I would use this opening blog to give a bit of background.

As the owner of a Montessori Nursery School in Hampshire, I used to receive catalogues from educational suppliers that were filled with pages of great resources for young children.

As a mum of two small children myself at the time, I found it surprising how few of those great resources could be found on the High Street.

Having moved to Surrey, I worked as a volunteer in local schools, helping children learn to read with phonics. Because I no longer had access to the educational catalogues, I spent many hours making resources and trying to find what I could on the internet, but it was hard work.

So came the idea of setting up an internet shop where parents could go and find all the resources they needed in one place, along with some information for those who wanted to help their children learn to read with phonics.

One of our most popular pages has been the Hear the Sounds page – where children can click on a letter (or letters) to hear how to say the sound in a ‘pure’ way (with no ‘uh’ at the end of the consonants) – so important when the time comes to blend sounds into words.

5 years on, we remain a small, family run internet business but big changes have taken place since those early days. One of the biggest changes has been that, since 2006, all primary schools are expected to teach phonics to children in Reception. Many schools now use one of the main commercial programmes such as Jolly Phonics or Read Write Inc., or follow the Letters and Sounds programme. Although The Letters and Sounds programme is free to schools, unlike the commercial programmes, it comes with no resources. Teachers therefore either have to make their own, or try to find suitable resources to support their teaching.

We now offer Jolly Phonics and Read Write Inc. programmes, resources specifically made to support Letters and Sounds plus many more Activities and Games that are suitable for parents to use at home and teachers to use in the classroom.

5 years ago it was very difficult to find suitable decodable reading books – an essential part of learning to read with phonics. Today, there are really good books available – I particularly like the Dandelion Launchers and Readers that were published last year and they seem to be proving popular with parents and teachers alike.

Customers often ask if we have a catalogue but, because we are always trying to improve the range of what we can offer, a hard copy would soon be out of date!

So our website continues to grow with the times. If you haven’t visited us yet, or if you have and you didn’t find what you were looking for, we would love to hear from you!