Why experts recommend phonics to teach reading

Phonics has been around for a long time. In fact, the idea that reading can be taught by connecting letters to their sounds showed up as early as the 1600s. Throughout the 19th century and more than half of the 20th, phonics was how most American children learned to read.

Several decades of research have shown that phonics is an essential part of an evidence-based approach to reading instruction.

What is phonics?

A phonics approach helps children learn how to connect each written letter to its corresponding sound. For example, the letter ‘b’ makes a /b/ sound, like at the beginning of the word “ball.” 

This helps early readers break the “code” of the English language. Instead of memorizing thousands of individual words, your child sounds out—or decodes—words they’ve never seen before. With practice, they can use phonics skills to quickly decode new words and almost immediately recognize familiar ones. This helps with comprehension, too: When your child doesn’t have to work as hard to read each word, they can focus more easily on the meaning of the text.

An analysis of hundreds of research studies conducted by the National Reading Panel found that children receiving phonics instruction had better decoding skills—including the ability to recognize and pronounce irregularly spelled words. Systematic phonics instruction is also linked to better reading comprehension, particularly in kindergarten and first grade.

Phonics activities to support your child’s literacy skills

To become a fluent reader, your child must be able to comfortably blend individual sounds into words or parts of words. This decoding takes a lot of practice ❤️

Learning to read doesn’t happen overnight. Take frequent breaks as you practice phonics skills with your child. They may need a few minutes or even a few days between sessions. Remember to acknowledge your child’s small successes along the way, like sounding out their first word or telling a story from a wordless picture book. These small wins are meaningful steps on the path to becoming a confident reader.

One of the best ways to support your child’s phonics instruction is to reinforce the concepts through fun activities at home. Here are some tips to guide you:

Focus on each letter’s sound, not its name

As your child learns to read, it’s important to emphasize the sound each letter represents, which isn’t always the same as its name.  For your child to understand the meaning of the text they read, they need lots of practice identifying letter shapes—both uppercase and lowercase—and their sounds. 

The ABCs with Mr. Z from The Reading Skill Set is both a story and a phonics scavenger hunt. The children in Mr. Z’s class are given five letters each. Then, they must find as many objects as they can that start with each letter’s most common sound. When they’re done searching, they share what they found with the rest of the class. After you read each page, you and your child can work together to find all of the illustrations that start with that letter’s most common sound. A list at the back of the book helps you check to make sure you found them all 😉

Help your child join sounds together

As they become more comfortable pronouncing individual letter sounds, your child can begin joining the sounds together to read or spell a word. This is called blending. Blending allows your child to gradually read longer words with more fluency. At first, they’ll practice joining a consonant with a vowel, which is the easiest combination to blend. The first whole words they read are known as CVC words—consonant, vowel, consonant.

A consonant blend is a pair of consonants without a vowel in between, like the cl inclick and the gr in grass. Blending consonants is tricky, but practicing helps your child notice and learn spelling patterns. This prepares them to read a wider variety of words. Crossword Builder and Wooden Sound Tiles from Part 2 of The Reading Skill Set give your child a fun way to work up to reading longer words with more complex phonics rules. There are six trays in Crossword Builder, along with a booklet of 15 puzzles that get progressively harder. 

Show your child how to break long words into smaller pieces

Many long words are made up of smaller segments your child can sound out. This makes intimidating words more approachable and can also help your child work out a word’s meaning. For example, in the word “unstoppable,” the prefix un- means “not.” The root word is “stop” and the suffix  -able means “capable of.” When your child reads the individual segments—at first piece by piece and then fluently all together—they can both decode it and learn the meaning of the whole word: not able to be stopped. 

Prefix and Suffix Story Fix from Part 3 of The Reading Skill Set is a cooperative game with no winning or losing. Your child fills in the missing parts with root words to create funny sentences, which can be read as conversations with you, short stories, or riddles. To create the silliest sentences possible—a big motivator for many children—encourage your child to place the root word magnets before they read the words on their card. 

The Reading Skill Set

A phonics-based program that motivates
your child to read through play.

Learn more