Guide to Foundations of Reading
Phonics is the correspondance between written language and spoken language. Phonics leads to an understanding of the alphabetic principle. The alphabetic principle is an understanding that words are composed of letters that represent sound. Phonics is designed for students in kindergarten and first grade. Phonics instruction should be taught for two years. Success in phonics at an early age, leads to later achievement in reading, writing and spelling.

Researchers believe that when teaching Phonics, a systematic and explicit approach should be taken. One example of this kind of approach is Fundations. Fundations is a sequential method to teach the relationship between letters and sounds. It is a phonological/phonemic awareness, phonics and spelling program, designed for the general education classroom. Another approach to teaching to Phonics is Lively Letters. Lively letters uses a more implicit approach towards teaching the relationship between written and spoken language. Lively letter is a hands-on approach to developing reading skills.
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Some important definitions are:

Consonant: All sounds represented by letters except a,e,i,o,u.

Consonant blend: two or three consonants grouped together. However, each consonant holds its original sound. Ex. L blends -bl, R blends -cr, S blend -sm, Three letters -str
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Consonant digraphs: Two or more consonants combined to produce a new sound. Ex. Shell -sh, Think -th

Vowel: The sounds represented by letters a,e,i,o,u. There are both short and long vowels.

Vowel digraph: Two or more vowels adjacent to one another. The first vowel has a long sound and the second is silent. Ex. Boat -oa, Beat -ea

Vowel dipthong: A blend of two separate vowel sounds. Ex. Foil -oi, Saw -aw.

R-controlled vowels: Vowels followed by an "r". Ex. star -ar, her -er.

Phonograms/Rimes-Letter patterns that help form word families or rhyming words. Teaching rimes is very important for beginner readers because children can use rimes to read and write new words.

Syllable: Vowel or clusters of letters containing a vowel produced as a unit.

High Frequency Words:
Some words appear in texts often, however do not follow the typical rules of the English language. These words are very important to the text. However, since they are not phonetically regular, high-frequency words should be taughting using whole word instruction. Whole word instruction is when readers read/learn the entire word instead of breaking the word down into separate sounds.

Assessments for Phonics:​

One useful tool to assess a person's knowledge of the alphabetical principle is the DIBELS Nonsense World Fluency test. This test evaluates children's knowledge of letter-sound correspondence as well as their ability to blend letters together forming unusual patterns or "nonsense" words. This truly accesses the student's knowledge of phonics because, rather than just memorizing the word, the student must understand letter-sound correspondence to read the word correctly.
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Activities: Here are some helpful activities for increasing phonics knowledge

1. Phonics and Paint Chip Word Families: This activity provides students with an opportunity to work on their phonograms/rimes. With this activity students can increase their knowledge of letter patterns that help form word families. Below we have provided a link that shows an example of this activity.
 http://www.serving-pink-lemonade.com/2010/06/reading-game.html

2. Phonics Box: This is a great and inexpensive way for students to practice and understand the various beginning letter sounds of each word. For example, if a student has a plastic ice cream cone, they can identify the beginning letter sound of the ice cream cone as /i/ and place the ice cream cone in the /i/ drawer. This is a fun and interactive way for students to practice segmenting words. Below is a link showing an example of a phonics box.

PHONICS
