Give your child the head start they deserve – get them reading fast
Reading is an absolutely essential life skill that will enable future success, in school, college and later in work. This course is designed to help you understand the basics of using phonics as a key reading strategy. It provides an overall introduction to phonics and gives you tools to use that will help lay down a foundation for reading fluency.
What you’ll learn
- You will learn ‘why’ using Synthetic Phonics is a valuable and worthwhile reading strategy..
- You will learn to teach letter sounds and link those sounds to letter names using picture cues and actions..
- If you have a child where English is a second language, using phonics early will help correct pronunciation of English sounds and words..
- You will be able to help your child to decode words using techniques for segmenting and blending..
- You’ll be able to help you child identify ‘sight words’ (high frequency words) in context and isolation.
- You’ll use simple monitoring tools to assess your child’s progress.
- From the course materials you can create your own resource library.
Course Content
- Introduction –> 2 lectures • 5min.
- A Rationale for Teaching Synthetic Phonics –> 4 lectures • 8min.
- Theory to Practice: Teaching Initial Sounds –> 6 lectures • 18min.
- Segmenting and Blending –> 5 lectures • 14min.
- High Frequency Words –> 5 lectures • 10min.
- Teaching Digraphs –> 6 lectures • 15min.
- In Conclusion –> 1 lecture • 3min.
Requirements
Reading is an absolutely essential life skill that will enable future success, in school, college and later in work. This course is designed to help you understand the basics of using phonics as a key reading strategy. It provides an overall introduction to phonics and gives you tools to use that will help lay down a foundation for reading fluency.
In each section we discuss reasons for using phonics. You will find lots of very colourful resources (with a value of more than $70) that will give you hands-on practise. You can download directly from within the course itself and they are free for you to use.
Working through four critical stages
1. You will get used to using the sounds of the alphabet, rather than letter names.
2. You will help your child to match sounds to letters
3. As you progress you will learn how to sequence phonemes, and use resources such as picture cues, and some crazy, crazy actions (TPR) that your child will love to engage with.
4. You will explore and learn techniques to present the first 100 high frequency words (sight words), that are a bit ‘tricky’ because they can’t be decoded.
5. You will move on to digraphs that can be a bit challenging. Here you’ll understand the different types of digraphs and how to show your child so they can begin to read more complex words and texts.
Your lead instructor for the course, Brenda Martin is a literacy a specialist and primary/elementary school teacher with more than 35 years experience in the UK and overseas with many international children. Brenda simplifies the use of phonics for you the parent, and for teachers who are new to phonics. With a wide range of resources for you to download and use, work along with Brenda and quickly master the steps to teach your children to read in a way that is motivating and fun for both kids and adults alike.
Brenda’s relaxed manner, clear knowledge and expertise makes this course a must for anyone who wants to provide early reading support to their children.