What is Phonics?
Phonics is when a reader learns to use letter/sound relationships to form words and is able to recognize words when he sees them.
This approach to teaching reading and writing is based on hearing all the sounds of English. Each sound is related to a letter or group of letters.
Long before the baby can talk, he is interested in sounds and makes many of the basic ones. He hits on them by accident as he babbles. He may repeat the ones he likes and thus imitate himself before imitating the sounds others make.
And as the child develops some speech he is also interested in sounds various creatures make like bow wow, quack quack, etc. Even before speech develops he hears his mother sing lullabies and sing short songs to him. And this makes the child automatically interested in sounds
Phonics is the system of written letters and letter combinations, which represent the sounds in spoken language, e. g. the written letter, p, represents the sound at the beginning of pony. The written combination th represents the sound at the beginning of three.
Phonemes are the smallest units of spoken language. They are the sounds that form syllables and words. For example, there are three phonemes in mat.
Phonemes include sounds represented by letter combinations such as th. Keep in mind that phonemes are sounds.There are about 40 to 45 phonemes in English. Phonemic awareness helps lay a solid foundation for spelling and word recognition skills.
The goal is not phoneme mastery. The goal is phoneme awareness.
