Over the past
30 years, there have been many different ideas on how best we can
help children to read. Because many of these ideas failed to get children
reading, there has been a national focus on learning to read. The
National
Institute of Child Health and Human Development has funded research
into the whole area of reading, and has established
what teaching methods actually succeed.
Fantastic Phonics
has been totally based on this research. This means that Fantastic
Phonics offers the best possible teaching tool
The
Research has been summarised - Click
Here
What
the Proven Research says
The key
for reading success is the child's "phonemic awareness".
This means
how well the child can identify sounds within words, and match
the letters which create those sounds.
Likewise,
when a child experiences difficulty, it is generally the case
that the child has a low "phonemic awareness".
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PHONICS is
the teaching system which helps children (and adults) recognise and
associate sound-letter relationships.
PHONICS teaches
children how to "decode" the words, and is shown to be the
most successful reading strategy.
As the maturity
of the reader develops (skill in decoding) the process becomes faster
and more fluent - we even come to believe that it "all in the
memory". Its not - even the most skilled adult readers scan the
words as they read. What is memorised is the sound-letter relationships
- and the variations which "break the rules".
The 3 Series of FANTASTIC PHONICS are designed to support the
different stages in this learn-to-read process.
Series One (20 storybooks) covers the essential Phonic sounds.
Each story illustrates how particular letter combinations make predictable
sounds, and they teach children how to "decode" simple sentences
using Phonics, a few sight words, and memory development.
Series
Two (20 storybooks) extends the child's reading knowledge, with
more complex Phonic decoding, double syllable words, punctuation and
the introduction of spelling variations (eg, pie, high, sky). While
the child reads through Series Two, Series One is used for
revision, to build speed, and to build "instant recall"
of the 48 phonic sounds which create the English language.
Series
Three (20 storybooks) extends your child into increasingly challenging
words and sentence structure. Multi-syllable words are introduced,
and sight words are increasingly introduced. Variation and rules are
covered, such as "i before e except after c", and children
are taught how different spellings can create the same sound ( blew,
blue, too, shoe, you) - and the same spelling can create different
sounds ("ou" in you, tough, though).
Phonemic Awareness
When children are old enough to discriminate between a picture
and an alphabet letter, they are generally old enough to read. The
KEY SKILL in reading is
"matching
the letters and letter combinations with the
sounds children hear in everyday speech"
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This
is called "Phonemic Awareness". The English
language is formed through 48 different sounds ... when we combine
these sounds in speech, we create the words of language. The
English language has evolved over thousands of years, and spellings
have been created (or adopted, or borrowed, or stolen) from
various dialects, and different cultures have also contributed
to the spelling - "the sounding" - of words in English.
The
end result is that while there are "rules" for writing
and speech - spelling conventions - often there is more than
one way to create (spell) a sound. And, sometimes the same spelling
can have more than one sound - for example, /ou / has a different
sound in rough, sought, through, our, you ... and so on. In
fact, while there are only 48 phonemes, there are 70 different
spellings to create them (for each sound, there's nearly always
two ways of spelling it).
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A Page from Book 27
(page reduced
to 25%)
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A Page from Book 59
(page reduced
to 25%)
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PHONICS
is the system which explains and describes the letter combinations
with the sounds they create. Children are taught the sounds,
taught how letters can be used to create them, and taught
how words are formed. This is the skill of PHONIC DECODING.
Phonics
provides a way for children to "sound out" (decode)
the vast majority of words in the English language. By showing
them how words are formed, they learn to recognise the "component
pieces" of words, and associate sounds to those letters
- within a context of other "pieces".
FANTASTIC PHONICS
does not teach Phonics alone. As the child matures, other
strategies come into play, such as sight words (remembering
the specific spelling of the word) and contextual clues ("guessing"
the meaning and sound of a word by the surrounding words).
But a solid Phonics training gives your child the very best
results.
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The key skills
of successful reading :
- the ability to recognise letter combinations in a word,
- associate those letters with a predictable sound,
- memorise the sound-letter relationships so that decoding
is rapid ...
- create fluent, accomplished reading.
These are the skills
taught by FANTASTIC PHONICS ... its time to start ...
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