You may, or may not, remember your early years in school, but I am sure most people have a memory of learning the alphabet; a is for apple, b is for ball, and singing the alphabet song. Maybe you even remember that frieze that wound around the classroom!
Now, there was nothing wrong with that….I myself learnt to read in that very same way. BUT….years of studying, looking at children’s development and progression, and case studies have shown us that teaching children to read is so much more than just learning the alphabet. After all, we’re looking for our children to get a better education than us, right?
We need to adjust our thinking from the 26 letters of the alphabet to an alphabetic code consisting of 44 phonemes (phone = sound).
I have always found this fascinating and hadn’t really thought about it until it was pointed out! Now, I absolutely love exploring words and especially love teaching phonics. The key is to teach it very systematically and look for opportunities when reading to point out phonemes that the children have been learning and give them meaning. As children develop their phonetic awareness and ability to both hear the sounds (phones) and recognise them in the written form (graphemes - graph meaning visual, like in graphics), we can then start to explore what we call the alternative sounds.
In many words, we combine letters to make digraphs (di = two). For an example of alternative digraphs, we would generally teach ‘ay’ (as in day) before looking at ‘ai’ (as in rain). We would play lots of games involving sorting words and noticing the patterns that we discover. Can you spot a pattern?
ay | ai |
day | rain |
say | train |
play | brain |
You got it! (Hopefully - I'm not in the room with you to verify that).
‘ay’ is usually at the end of words.
‘ai’ is usually in the middle of words.
Once this is secure we would then start looking at the split digraph a_e as in cake (which I learnt as the magic e!), but that can wait for another time!
Challenge time! Can you come up with any words that use 'ay' in the middle of a word? Comment some rule-breakers for us! Children LOVE a rulebreaker.
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