How to Teach Intensive Phonics

Video Transcript

"Hi, I'm Laura from Youngwritersworkshops.com and I'm going to talk about how to teach intensive phonics. Phonics is learning the sounds of letters and the sounds that they make combined with other letters. This is a building block in learning how to read. So to teach an intensive phonics approach you'll want to really focus, spend a lot of time on one specific sound, until it's mastered. Then a child will move to another sound. Now some good tools in teaching phonics are cards with the letters on them that on the flip side might have a way to represent the sound. So that they can begin to associate the sound with the letter shapes that they are learning. Using games, on line games could be a great way because of the multimedia approach, it helps them the sounds and the actual symbol together, and they might have some fun which will reinforce the learning. So I recommend a site called Starfall.com which has some great phonics activities and also some worksheets that you can print out that you can use in your intensive phonics teaching. Another approach to teaching intensive phonics would be to focus on that letter sound that you're working on in a way that incorporates a game that you've made up. Maybe a game like concentration where they have to match that sound repeatedly with pictures that represent the sound, so if they're learning the A sound, maybe find lots of different pictures that are things with the A sound, like cAt, Apple, anything where you can help them to learn that sound and reinforce it repeatedly. So these are some ideas about how to teach intensive phonics."