This post is for parents who want to understand more of the benefits of synthetic phonics for kindergarteners.
Synthetic phonics is a structured approach to teaching children to read. It helps kindergarteners learn the relationships between the sounds (phonemes) of spoken language and the letter symbols (graphemes) of the written language. This approach can help all children learn to read, and it will especially benefit children with learning difficulties.
When learning to read using such an approach, kindergarteners (or at preschooler stage) are first taught individual sounds and then after that they learn to blend these sounds to form words. For example, a child might be taught to read the word ‘dog’ by first learning the individual sounds that represent the letters ‘d’, ‘o’ and ‘g’ and then blending these sounds together to make the word ‘dog’. This process of recognising and blending sounds to be able to read is known as decoding. In reverse, a blended word can be broken up or segmented into individual sounds, which is then called encoding.
The objective of teaching kindergarteners how to blend and segment sounds and form words or spell out words is to get them familiarized with words in order to learn how to read. Thereafter, the spelling, pronunciation, and meaning of specific words become held in the kid’s memory and the words will be recognized automatically. This is called orthographic mapping.
Because synthetic phonics focuses on sounds all through the word, rather than initially focusing on first sounds only, young children learn to blend and sound letters all through the word, and this enables them to read and spell words rather quickly. On the other hand, an approach called whole language approach emphasizes teaching kids the meaning of text over the mechanics of reading. Children are encouraged in this latter approach to use context clues and their own experiences to understand what they are reading. Whether one is more superior over another will be covered in another blog. For now, I believe synthetic phonics is a sound approach to learning to read and can be applied to kindergarteners due to its simplicity and structured style.
Benefits of Synthetic Phonics for Kindergarteners
1.Early Reading Skills:
One of the most significant advantages of synthetic phonics is its ability to equip children with reading skills at an earlier age. This foundational skill sets the stage for future academic success.
2. Understanding Phonemes:
Your child who then learns reading through phonics will have excellent phonemic awareness – which is the ability to hear, identify, and manipulate letter symbols with their appropriate sound. Understanding the sounds of language is crucial for his reading and spelling adventure.
3. Fun Learning Experience:
The approach is designed to be engaging and enjoyable for preschoolers, often incorporating games and vibrant visuals to enhance the learning experience. Learning phonics is often more fun and as its program structure engages children. For example, games are often tied to lessons, and the visuals which accompany the lessons are usually very vibrant. This approach is meant to enhance the learning experience, and ultimately results in better overall development of reading and writing skills.
4. Confidence and Enjoyment:
Mastering reading early can boost your kindergartener’s confidence and enjoyment in learning. With the synthetic phonics way of encoding and decoding letters and words, he will feel good about himself and this positivity plus the fun and varied approach to phonics learning will only encourage him to read more.
5. General Cognitive Development with Long-term Educational Benefits:
It promotes achievement in other subjects beyond English, such as even Mathematics (story sums), and helps in the development of general thinking skills. Introducing kindergarteners (even preschoolers) to letters in a fun, play-based way helps them get a head start when they commence school – making the transition less daunting when they are armed with better developed cognition.
6. Special Needs Consideration
With children who have learning challenges, there is often difficulty associating letters with their sounds. For example, dyslexics tend to struggle with forming visual representations of the sounds they hear and many have poor working memory. Therefore, not using a systematic approach that builds on skills will not guarantee good success in nurturing reading. Such kids should learn a group of sounds then decode words using only the sounds they know. From here, they can move on to another group and repeat. Such is the synthetics phonics way.
Implementing Synthetic Phonics at Home
Here are some tips when helping your kindergartener benefit from learning synthetic phonics at home:
i) Do keep your lessons brief and effective. Do revise what they learnt before and build up upon these with new sounds or letters.
ii) Have your kid read aloud each sentence in a book or worksheet exercise a few times before moving on. Repetition can help to improve the fluency of his or her reading. If he is unable to read accurately and falters, be patient and give encouraging words. Help your kindergartener add more expression to his reading to develop his storytelling voice.
iii) Incorporate a variety of phonics games and activities to help to keep your kindergartener engaged and do revise what he has learnt prior. Improvise simple games such as a game of letter bingo or something more complex such as an interactive online game.
iv) The end-goal is to inculcate independence in learning so do allow your child to perform each task himself so that it can give him the confidence and the boldness to try new things. This could be a simple task like holding up flash cards or pointing to the graphemes in words while making the associated sounds aloud.
Challenges and Considerations
The main challenges in teaching phonics include catering to different learning styles and dealing with struggling readers. Some considerations one has to make:
- It is very technical and may prove quite dull to learn if the teacher or parent is not competent enough to address the learning challenges of his pupil or child. Frankly, phonemes are not very exciting! It may then be quite hard to keep your kindergartener glued to a lesson or focused enough to follow the work.
- The visual learners will likely not follow the lesson. The strong visual learners will probably not easily follow synthetic phonics when delivered in a group setting in class. So, do recognize that each child is unique and may learn at their own pace. Teachers or parents need to give due consideration to the approach needed to teach young kids how to read.
Conclusion
When our kindergarteners are armed with reading skills and they possess phonemic awareness, reading becomes a breeze and confidence builds up in them. Learning becomes fun while they healthily develop thinking and problem-solving skills. A good phonics education incorporating synthetic phonics approach into a wholesome reading program should encourage and provide opportunities for our kindergarteners and even kids with learning challenges to master reading and even writing.
The ultimate goal is to foster a life-long love of reading.
To enrol, check out our SAE lessons on how it could help your child.