How to Teach Phonics Skills and Ideas to Children or Students

Teaching your children or students strong phonics skills and ideas is vitally important for better reading. Ultimate Phonics gives you a complete program that teaches all the phonics they'll ever need.

Why phonics skills are so important

Phonics skills and ideas are the foundation of better reading. Without strong phonics skills it's impossible to have good reading fluency, comprehension, and spelling.

Phonics skills and reading achievement

Think about it: if students are misreading words, skipping words, or reading slowly they can't be good readers. If these problems aren't fixed they permanently block students from developing into great readers.

Good readers read accurately, rapidly, automatically and with high comprehension. Strong phonics skills, along with spoken language fluency, are essential for good reading.

All they need is a few hours per week

You can teach most children or students all the phonics skills they'll ever need in just a few hours per week over the course of a year. It's important to realize that most kids never master these critical phonics ideas on their own. And a lot of the time you can't count on overburdened schools to do the best job of teaching. So make the decision now to spend a few hours per week helping your kids or students to learn the vital phonics skills necessary for better reading.

Use a complete phonics program

It's very important to choose a complete phonics program that teaches all the phonics sounds and rules of English. Many phonics programs are incomplete — they teach some of the sounds and rules but don't do the whole job. It's like having a program that's supposed to teach the alphabet but it only covers half the letters. Ultimate Phonics is a complete program that teaches your children and students all the phonics skills and ideas they'll ever need to become great readers.

Teach with direct systematic phonics

It's also very important to choose a program that teaches with direct systematic phonics. Mountains of studies have proven that phonics skills are best taught with a direct systematic approach. Yet astonishingly many so-called phonics programs, especially cartoon game software, lack this basic requirement. As a result many phonics programs do a poor job of teaching because they have bad educational design.

An excellent direct systematic phonics program must carefully organize all the phonics sounds and rules of English into a sequence. Then the program must walk your students through the complete phonics sequence, one step at at a time, with lots of controlled reading practice all along the way. This is exactly the approach used by Ultimate Phonics.

Emphasize decodable reading practice

The best activity for learning to read is actual reading. Reading experience, not game playing, is the key to developing great readers. The problem is finding suitable reading material for beginning or struggling readers. If you just take a book off the shelf, even one that is supposedly written on grade level, the phonics rules used in the words are often so complicated and inconsistent that many students are overwhelmed and confused.

When students are first learning to read it is essential that they begin with carefully controlled reading material that enables them to gain a lot of reading experience without being forced to guess. A well designed program enables your students to read thousands of different words and sentences without ever needing to guess or skip!

The best programs carefully organize all the phonics rules and reading material and then teach it progressively, with lots of controlled decodable reading practice. In Ultimate Phonics, your children and students read over 4,400 different words and 2,100 sentences written with those words. All the material is 100% decodable, so that at every point they have already learned everything they need to successfully read the lessons.

Listen to them read out loud

It is very important that you listen to your children and students read out loud. Many studies have shown that monitored oral reading is one of the most effective ways of learning to read. By reading out loud, they make the clear connection between speech and print. It brings home the idea that print is nothing more than encoded speech, and when we read we are decoding the print back into speech.

Insist on accuracy

When you listen to them read their systematic phonics lessons, insist on 100% reading accuracy. No guessing or skipping allowed! If the program is well designed and they are doing the lessons in order, students will have already learned everything they need to sound out the words and sentences. There is no reason for students to guess.

Many students have developed the bad habit of guessing when they read. They constantly misread and skip over words that could easily be sounded out. This wreaks havoc with reading comprehension since they are constantly changing the meaning by misreading the text. To make a major improvement in reading we need to fix this problem.

Whenever students misread or skip a word, stop them and ask them to look at the word again and to sound it out. If necessary, find the word in Ultimate Phonics and review it. By insisting on accuracy throughout the program, students will become fluent, accurate readers with good comprehension.

Set regular reading times

You should set a regular routine for teaching your children or students to be better readers. We recommend several sessions per week with each session lasting between 30 and 60 minutes. During the sessions your children or students will learn how to read the lessons on the computer and then they will read the lessons out loud to you, either from the computer or their Words and Sentences book.

If you already have regular times when you read to your children, that's a great time to include their phonics lessons. You can trade off reading to each other. When you read to them, you read the same books you normally would. When they read to you, they read from the Ultimate Phonics lessons. You can truthfully tell them that when they finish reading all the lessons in their Ultimate Phonics program, they'll be able to read books just like you do.

Find out if Ultimate Phonics can help

Try our free 10 minute reading test to easily check the phonics skills of your children or students. If they have trouble reading the test then we 100% guarantee they will make big improvements in reading ability by using Ultimate Phonics