How I teach my children to read: Phonics stages overview

This series of articles is for parents who are considering teaching their child to read themselves. I think it is one of the most rewarding things you can do as a parent. Definitely worth having a go! Having taught several of my children to read, here is my favourite step-by-step method. The headline is: prioritise phonological awareness first, introduce phonics in a logical order, and use lots of fun decodable readers.

In this second post, I give an overview of the order in which I introduce different sounds, so that you can get your bearings and choose the right stage of reading book for your child.

Articles in the series:

1. Phonological awareness
2. Phonics stages overview for parents (this article)
3. Choosing decodable phonics readers
4. What next? Early chapter books

Phonics overview for parents

I have used phonics strategies to teach my children to read, and it has worked really well for us. It makes so much sense to me to learn the different sounds that can occur, and put those blocks together to read words. I broadly like and follow the order in which the different graphemes are introduced in the English National Curriculum. The great advantage of this order is that many reading schemes align with the national curriculum, and so it is easy to find books introducing the sounds in the same order. Children are then able to decode the book using what they have already learned, and not get frustrated.

Hopefully by scanning through the ‘stages’ of phonics sounds below, you can get a sense of how phonics-based reading schemes develop a child’s skills, and perhaps also figure out the level that your child is currently at.

1. Single letter sounds (e.g. s,a,t,n,i,p)

At this first stage, one letter corresponds to one sound, which keeps things simple. I always introduce the sound of the letter first rather than its ‘name’. So we learn ‘b’ rather than ‘bee’. Try to avoid adding a vowel sound onto the end of the consonants, just stick to the pure consonant sound, so ‘b’ rather than ‘buh’.

Even at this stage, I introduce the main different sounds that the vowels can say. We learn ‘a’ can say ‘a’ as in apple, ‘ay’ as in acorn, and ‘ah’ as in father. Technically in British English ‘a’ can also say ‘o’ as in swan, ‘aw’ as in ball, and ‘e’ as in many. But at this point I feel the main three sounds is enough to learn!

• A can say ‘a’ as in apple, ‘ay’ as in acorn, ‘ah’ as in father.
• E can say ‘e’ as in ten, and ‘ee’ as in me.
• I can say ‘i’ as in pig, ‘eye’ as in idea, and ‘ee’ as in stadium.
• O can say ‘o’ as in pot, ‘oh’ as in no, and ‘oo’ as in to.
• U can say ‘u’ as in but, ‘uh’ as in put, ‘oo’ as in ruler and ‘yew’ as in union.

I like to get a child to a point of confident blending with single letter sounds before introducing two or three letter sounds which might confuse them.

2. Double consonants (ff,ll,ss) and consonant digraphs (ch, th, sh)

Adding in sounds made from more than one letter is a big step up. Double consonants (e.g. fuzz, hill, mess) are pretty straightforward for children to understand. The core consonant digraphs add a lot of possible words to a child’s repertoire. The core digraphs introduced here are:

• QU
• NG
• CK
• WH
• SH
• TH can say a soft ‘th’ as in thing, and a hard ‘th’ as in they. Some children will still be working on distinguishing these two sounds in their speech development.
• CH can say ‘ch’ as in teacher, ‘sh’ as in chef, and ‘k’ as in technical.

3. Consonant clusters

Consonant clusters are groups of consonants with no vowels between them. They can occur at the beginning of words such as squash, string, and play. They can also occur in the middle or ends of words, such as mulch, hand and fist. Children are not learning new sounds here, only learning how to combine them rapidly. For some children, the challenge will be more around articulating these clusters, as they tend to come towards the end of speech development.

4. Vowel digraphs and trigraphs which consistently make the same sound.

Now it is time to introduce vowel digraphs and trigraphs, or groups of two or three vowels which make a single sound. The easiest sounds to introduce are those digraphs which always make the same sound:

• EE
• IGH
• AR
• ER, IR and UR
• OR
• AI
• OA
• OO (note that this can make two similar sounds, a short ‘uh’ as in book, and also a longer ‘oo’ as in food).

OY/OI and AY/AI only make a single sound, but there are two possible ways to make that sound. For future spelling, it is helpful to explain that at the end of words you need to use the OY/AY spelling, because English words do not end in I, J, U or V.

Where possible I like to begin with books which focus on one of these graphemes at a time. The Dandelion Phonics books are particularly good for this.

5. Vowel digraphs and trigraphs which can make several different sounds.

At this point, phonics starts to become more complicated, because the child has to decide, whilst they are reading the word, what sound the grapheme should make. Hopefully, by this point they have sufficient confidence and fluency with most simpler graphemes that they can focus on the new challenge.

I prefer to start with phonics books which cover all the sounds a particular grapheme can make. For example, EA can say ‘e’ as in bread, ‘ee’ as in knead, and ‘ay’ as in great.

Once we have introduced all the vowels, I then move on to phonics books which cover all the ways of making a particular sound. For example, the sound ‘ee’ can be made with EE as in feed, EA as in knead, Y as in happy and E as in me.

This is also the point at which ‘Silent E’ is introduced, specifically in the role of changing vowel sounds from short to long. For example, the ‘a’ in mad becomes an ‘ay’ in made.

Also in this stage, some less common consonant combinations and sounds are typically introduced, such as WR, KN, soft G and soft C.

6. Suffixes (e.g. ti, ci, si).

The final phonics stage is tackling some common graphemes typically found in suffixes.

• TI says ‘sh’ as in invention
• TURE says ‘chur’ as in adventure
• CI says ‘sh’ as in musician
• SI says ‘sh’ as in confession and ‘zh’ as in persuasion
• SURE says ‘zhur’ as in closure

The Dandelion Readers Extended Code Level 4 books are particularly good for these suffixes.

Now that we’ve looked at the big picture of learning to read with phonics, we’re ready to look at the pros and cons of different decodable reading schemes in the next article in this series!