Phonics is a way of teaching reading and writing in English. The method systematically introduces the two kinds of building blocks of words: phonemes<\/em> and graphemes<\/em>.\u00a0 You also learn the relationship between these building blocks, called\u00a0grapheme-phoneme correspondence<\/em>.<\/p>\n Phonemes are the sounds that combine to form words. We therefore need to learn to hear these sounds, identify them and blend them (phonemic awareness<\/em>).\u00a0Graphemes, in contrast, are the ways of writing each phoneme. Since there are several ways of writing most sounds, learning to read and write English is notoriously challenging. For example,\u00a0a_e<\/i> (\u201cbake\u201d),\u00a0ai<\/i> (\u201caim\u201d),\u00a0eigh<\/i> (\u201cweigh\u201d) and\u00a0ay<\/i> (\u201chooray\u201d) are all ways of writing \u0101 (long \u201cay\u201d).<\/p>\n Learning to read and write is not easy. But taking a sequential approach to introducing these building blocks and working with decodable texts<\/a> makes it easier. That sequential approach is phonics.\u00a0 The Wikipedia article<\/a>\u00a0states that the goal of this method…<\/p>\n …is to enable beginning readers to decode new written words by sounding them out, or, in phonics terms, blending the sound-spelling patterns.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Most importantly, it differs from the \u201cwhole language\u201d approach, which focuses on the correspondence between specific strings of letters and words.\u00a0By the way, if you’re interested in learning more about this method (it’s history, etc.) the\u00a0Wikipedia article<\/a>\u00a0is a good place to start. Detailed information about the phonics progression for the TAP ebook series<\/a> is\u00a0here<\/a>.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" What is phonics? Phonics is a way of teaching reading and writing in English. The method systematically introduces the two…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":360,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[147,224],"tags":[7,6,5,4],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.focusontap.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.focusontap.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.focusontap.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.focusontap.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.focusontap.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1"}],"version-history":[{"count":40,"href":"http:\/\/www.focusontap.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1233,"href":"http:\/\/www.focusontap.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1\/revisions\/1233"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.focusontap.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/360"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.focusontap.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.focusontap.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.focusontap.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}Why teach it?<\/h3>\n