How Can a Teacher Teach Phonics to Young Children?

Series Summary

Teachers play an integral role in the development and education of children. Working in schools, academies or a community setting, a teacher's job focuses on facilitating student learning through lessons and demonstrations. Teachers face the difficult job of keeping students engaged and excited about learning. While education careers are quite difficult, for most teachers, the benefit of shaping young minds far outweighs the challenges. In this free video series on education, an early childhood teacher discusses teaching children in preschool and kindergarten. Find out how to introduce numbers, action words, sight words and directional words to very young children, and get tips on introducing new concepts to them. Understand how a preschool classroom should be set up, and learn to develop a schedule for preschool and kindergarten. Discover the importance of early education with insider teaching tips.

Video Transcript

"One of the largest tasks that kindergarten teacher has in the classroom is teaching phonics to young children. Now, phonics actually means the associating a letter sound with a letter. For example, M would say mmm, and C would say kuh. So you not only want to teach children not only to recognize the letter but to recognize the sound that the letter makes. I would say that the best ways to introduce phonics to young children would include introducing one to two letters per week. This way, they're not overwhelmed and they're able to grasp what the letter, as well as it's sound. I would also recommend not introducing the letters in the order of the alphabet because often, child will rely simply on their knowledge of the alphabet song to complete their letters. I would try to introduce it in a mixed up fashion. Another tip that I would have for you in introducing phonics to young children would be to teach the short vowel sounds first. Disperse the vowels in there so maybe introduce four or five consonant and then a vowel. And I would say after every eight to ten letters, take a couple, take a week or so to review those and recap before you move on. Repetition is thee best way to introduce letters to children. Show it to them in every way, shape and form. Surround this learning centers that you may have in this classroom with these letters, create letter collages, do some hands on activities. You can actually teach these letters to the kiddos using hands on materials such as play-dough, practicing writing the letters in sand, just so they understand and thee entire time you'll want to repeatedly tell them the sound a letter makes. After they've mastered each of the letter individual sounds, you can start working on blending them together."