Teaching Kids to Read and Write

 Phonics in the Foundation Stage (Ages 3 to 5) Phonics is the relationship between sounds (phonemes) and letters or groups of letters (graphemes). Learning phonics involves listening to sounds, recognising sounds and discriminating between sounds as well as learning how sounds are represented by letters. When first learning phonics, children should have many opportunities to enjoy listening to and reading stories, poems, songs and rhymes, as well as information books about topics that interest them. How this book is organised Letters of the alphabet (p. 6-13) introduces upper- and lower-case letters, in order, by name. You could use these terms with your child or capital letters' and "lower-case letters' (as there is no other simple term for "lower-case'*). The letters are introduced in a way that helps children learn letter formation as well as position in the alphabet. There are further activities on the letters of the alphabet at later stages of the book (p. 28...

  Teaching notes for parents This book contains all of the worksheets for Lesson 1 There are three worksheets for each of the featured phonemes in the lesson. The activ- ities are designed to reinforce and extend the knowledge that has been learned from the Lesson 1 Soundcards. The Soundcards are the first stage of each lesson. Your child should watch and listen to a single Soundcard slideshow for one phoneme be- fore attempting the corresponding activity pages. The slideshow sounds out the pho- neme (or sound) and includes examples of the sound's usage, such as: 1. At the beginning of the word (initial) 2. Within a word (medial) 3. At the end of a word (final). The Handwriting activities are for writing practice of the phoneme on its own and within words. Forming these letters is an important part of the teaching process and should always be completed before moving on to the next phoneme in the lesson. The Revision activities at the end of the book are written to include all of th...