Early Reading Parent Guide

Program Guide

OVERVIEW | DECODING WITH PHONICS | USING THE PROGRAM | PRINTING

This Guide is designed to be printed. It outlines steps which will assist a child to read. In a family situation, you can print this document so that other family members can get more involved. Remember, children can't teach themselves to read - the experts all agree that the "magic" ingredient in learning to read is the amount of time the child spends reading under the supervision of an adult.

Structure of the FANTASTIC PHONICS
Series One covers the basic letter-sound relationships and essential Phonic skills. It is the essential first step in the learn-to-read process.

Series Two introduces a broader range of more complex Blends and challenging letter-sound relationships. It introduces key "sight words" and covers several "rules", such as the impact of silent "e".

Series Three takes the student into multi-syllable words, and begins to significantly enlarge the "mental library" of common words and letter-sound relationships. More sophisticated blends are introduced, including silent "k", "gh", "qu".

You can see the full list of stories, and view and print samples.

The Printed Word
Speech is an intuitive skill, whereas reading is not. We hear speech from the moment we are born, and speaking is a native skill for humans. Reading, however, is a learned skill of a very high order.

Most of us have forgotten how we learned to read, and just how hard it was. As a teacher, the first step is to understand what the printed word represents - an alphabetical code which attempts to capture (in print) the sounds of everyday speech. Of course, the glories of the written word can go far beyond this basic task, but we are concerned here with the process of learning-to-read written English.

Decoding The Printed Word
When a child first sees a page of text, it has very little meaning. To them, it is not like an ordinary picture - it is unintelligible. But, mysteriously, grownups can "read" the picture and make words and sentences. It is quite a mysterious code.

The English language is quite inconsistent. The same sound can be expressed by a number of different spellings. Knew, new, you, too, shoe, true - all these words have a common sound of "oo", but they have different spellings. The lack of consistency makes it difficult to explain to children - and that's where most children have problems - associating the "right" speech sound to the letter combination.

With this uncertainty, the child needs a consistent decoding tool which rewards effort with success. Phonics is the key which provides consistent decoding. FANTASTIC PHONICS also features the Rime Technique which provides a path-of-progression as the child's reading skills develop beyond elementary phonics.

How Phonics is Used to Teach
Phonics is way of explaining how words relate to speech. Phonics identifies regular letter combinations which occur within words, and teaches children the sounds that these key combinations make. Phonemes examines the written language in even greater detail, examining the smallest "sound units" which are found in words.

Explicit Instruction means that a phoneme is isolated for the children. For example, the teacher shows the children the letter m and says, "This letter says /mmm/." In this way a new phoneme is introduced. A new phoneme and other phonemes the children have learned should be briefly practiced each day, not in the context of words, but in isolation. These practice sessions need only be about 5 minutes long. The rest of the lesson involves using these same phonemes in the context of words and stories that are composed of only the letter-phoneme relationships the children know at that point.

Telling the children explicitly what single sound a given letter or letter combination makes is more effective in preventing reading problems than encouraging the child to figure out the sounds for the letters by giving clues.

To teach systematically means to coordinate the introduction of the sound-spellings with the material the children are asked to read (EARLY READING). In this program, the words and stories the children read are composed of only the sound-spelling relationships the children have learned. The teacher can synchronise all the children with the same reading material.

The most effective instructional programs teach children to read successfully with only 40 to 50 sound-spelling relationships. (Writing can require a few more, about 70 sound-spelling relationships.) The chart below represents the 48 most regular letter-phoneme relationships. (The given sounds for each of the letters and letter groups are either the most frequent sound or occur at least 75% of the time.)

Key Techniques of Phonics Instruction
The following types of phonemic awareness tasks have a positive effect on reading acquisition and spelling for pre-readers:
• rhyming,
• auditorily discriminating sounds that are different,
• blending spoken sounds into words,
• isolating sounds in words,
• counting phonemes,
• segmenting spoken words into sounds.

Explicit instruction in how segmentation and blending are involved in the reading process teaches children phonemic awareness, which is the essential skill in reading.

FANTASTIC PHONICS - the 48 most regular sound-letter relationships.

a as in fat	g as in goat	v
m	l	e
t	h	u-e as in use
s	u	p
I as in sit	c as in cat	w "woo" as in well
f	b	j
a-e as in cake	n	I-e as in pipe
d	k	y "yee" as in yuk
r	o-e as in pole	z
ch as in chip	ou as in cloud	kn as in know
ea beat	oy toy	oa boat
ee need	ph phone	oi boil
er fern	qu quick	ai maid
ay hay	sh shop	ar car
igh high	th thank	au haul
ew shrewd	ir first	aw lawn

Context
When decoding the written word, children use phonics to "work out" the word, by sounding each part of the word, and trying to match it to a word they know in speech. That's why its important to have the child read aloud - you can hear as they voice the possible word choices, and give guidance when needed.

Most children at some time attempt shortcuts to decoding ... "contextual associations" is one of these, where they attempt to guess a word either from the initial letters, the surrounding words, or the supposed intent of the sentence - or a combination of all three.

Reliance on "contextual clues" can result in wrong choices - which if allowed to continue unchecked, then become errors which are continually repeated. So, "contextual clues" are not a replacement for accurate decoding, and should not be relied upon.

Using the Program

Each Story An Exercise
The twenty stories in Series One are devoted to basic Phonic skills, which are considered essential for successful reading. In Series 2 & 3, the stories move forward into more complex letter combinations, and develops a "memory bank" of the key sound-letter relationships which form the basis of our reading and speech.

As the child memorises the letter combinations, decoding becomes faster and more intuitive. As the sound-letter relationships are committed to memory, students can learn to scan the words, and develop faster recall/decoding.

The child must commit the sound-letter relationships to memory for successful, fluent decoding. If the child needs to painstakingly, laboriously decode each and every word, they have very little concentration left to remember or comprehend what they've just read. If your child has difficulty remembering letter combinations and the sounds they make, it indicates that more work is required in Series One, with the focus of committing the sound-letter relationships to memory.

Progress through the program Story by Story, encouraging your child to memorise key letter combinations.

Sight (Whole) Words
There are only a few elementary words which defy any phonic decoding : for example, "the", "was", and "said". These words simply need to be learnt, and committed to memory. The rest should be decoded using phonic strategies.

Sight words need to be memorised.

New Words
Each story has new words which are found in the story. Naturally, children would rather leap forward to the story, but the Parent / Teacher should use some of these words to demonstrate the Phonic combinations and rhyme sounds in the story.

Find A Good Time To Read
Anytime is a good time, but just before bed is not a great time for your child's concentration, and for your patience. Set aside a "agreed" time of 15 minutes which is realistic, so it can be achieved regularly. The booklets are designed to be completed within 15 minutes - even the most reluctant readers can hold their concentration for that period. And, completing the booklet gives the child a chance to succeed, and a sense of achievement.

Spend 15 minutes a day reading with your child. The more time you allocate, the faster the progression.

Reading Aloud
Oral practice is essential. First, the child must approximate the words heard in everyday speech. Second, by reading aloud, the child reveals their thought processes, and allows the parent to monitor and improve their decoding technique.

Reading aloud is essential.

Sounding The Words
The beginning reader approximates the word by sounding it out, and then matching that approximation to a real word which fits the meaning of the sentence. This requires teaching, and time for adequate practice, and children vary in the amount of practice needed to achieve mastery. Blends should be taught as continuous sounds where possible e.g. "man" should be sounded "mmmaaannn" not as "mmm-aaa-nnn". Continuous blends make it easier to 'bend' the sounds into a real word.

Error Correction
Oral reading practice provides the parent with opportunities to provide corrective feedback to students. Every error is an opportunity for teaching: Systematic correction is far more valuable for students than is waiting for self-correction, or worse, ignoring errors because correction may dishearten the child. And don't believe that errors will eventually reduce of their own accord - they don't.

That being said, give your child the room for self correction. Your body language can be just as effective as an interruptive "No, that's not right" from the parent. Tapping the page, a movement of the hand - these are enough to send the message. And it allows the child to review and correct, without being "corrected".

As a suggestion, give praise when words are successfully decoded, and remain silent when not. That's usually adequate for the child to acknowledge error.

Repetition and Reinforcement
Repetition causes the words to become intuitive, or "second nature". Memorising the key letter combinations allows the child to decode without conscious effort. This means that the child's mental energy can be fully directed into comprehension. This is the process where the sounds become part of the "memory bank" and are available for immediate recall.

Reading Fluently
When you repeat earlier stories, the challenge should be directed toward more fluent decoding. Discuss with your child the need to improve the clarity of diction, and the delivery of the story. Pay attention to punctuation, "speech words", and emphasis.

We recommend that your nightly reading includes a new story, and a repeat story.

Making Progress
FANTASTIC PHONICS booklets form a tightly structured program. There is a deliberate progression from story to story. Hence, there is no point in the child progressing to the next story until the current booklet is 100% mastered. .

If you detect a problem, remain at that booklet until the problem is resolved.

Understand Punctuation
Explain the idea of a sentence in its role of presenting an 'idea' or a 'thought'. Well written English presents ideas within a grammatical structure which enables the ideas to be clearly understood. A sentence is a group of words which present an idea, and allows the writer to give the idea more potency through the choice of words. Help your child understand the concept of a sentence, and how the language can be used to add strength - and reading enjoyment - to the idea.

Ask the child to read the punctuation - to observe the writer's storytelling. A 'full-stop' at the end of a sentence implies a slight fall in the pitch of the voice- the voice goes lower. A 'question mark' has the opposite effect - the voice goes slightly higher.

Inverted commas - or 'speaking marks' as they are sometimes known - require a change in the voice tone, to indicate that the person in the story is talking. Hyphens and commas indicate a pause, and often lead to a slight change of focus within the sentence. Brackets and parenthesis reveal an idea as an 'aside', related but not central, and isolated for easier comprehension.

Print the Full Story
Make sure the "Print all Linked Pages" option is selected in the Print Dialog. There is a "Print Test Page" to check that the pages are positioned correctly.

Print Individual Pages
Navigate to the page using the links at the top of the page, and print the page, with "Print all Linked Pages" option not selected.

Printing the Stories - Legal Information
The Stories are designed for printing and reprinting. We encourage you to give printed copies to your friends. However, the stories are subject to Federal copyright laws. You are not permitted to print and/or copy the stories for commercial resale, or to produce copies for use in classroom or group teaching situations, without a Distribution License. You are expressly not permitted to change the stories in any way.