Best Nursery school in noida expressway

WELL BEGUN IS HALF DONE AND THIS MEANS

TEACHING PHONICS AND DECODING

Teaching phonics means teaching learners the precise relationships between letters and groups of letters and the sounds they represent, and how to use this knowledge to decode or spell unfamiliar words. Research evidence very strongly supports direct and systematic instructions in phonic knowledge to be provided soon after the child reaches the age of 5. This early start provides a firm foundation on which to build higher-order literacy skills.

Over the years, several different ways of teaching phonics have been developed. These include:

ü Analytic phonics

Letter- to sound relationship are taught by breaking down words already known by sight into their separate phonic components e.g. stop = /st/-/o/-/p/.

ü Synthetic phonics

Letter – to sound correspondences are explicitly taught and practiced first, and this knowledge is then used to sound- out and blend words in print (e.g./t/-/a/-/p/ = tap. The process of blending a sequence of sounds successfully is the main focus in this method. The initial learning of basic letter- sound correspondences is facilitated if children are required to write the letter at the same time as they say the sound and some programs teach letter formation (handwriting) in tandem with phonics.

ü Embedded phonics

This means using a combined analytic and synthetic approach to learn phonic units by decoding unfamiliar words that are met within paragraphs of meaning  text. This is less systematic (and therefore potentially less effective) than either of the above approaches.

ü Phonics through spelling

Children can learn a great deal about letter - to –sound correspondences as they attempt to spell the words they need as they write. ‘I want to write stop. How does it begin? /S/…./S-t/…./o/…./p/. Stop. OK. That looks good’. Again, the efficacy of this method is much less certain than the explicit teaching involved in synthetic and analytic phonics.

Currently, synthetic phonics has most support from research and is recommended as the approach of choice for beginning reading.

The teachers in primary wing of the School on Noida Expressway are trained before induction. It has been advocated at best practice in various key reports on the teaching of reading in Australia, the United Kingdom and the United States of America. It appears that the synthetic approach is equally effective regardless of whether it uses single-letter decoding or teaches students to recognize and blend larger units such as digraphs and other common letter groups. For most children, the order in which they learn letter-to-sound correspondences is not important. But when working with students who have difficulties mastering phonics it is often helpful consider how the most basic 26 single letter - to –sound correspondences might best be organized into a logical teaching sequence. One might begin, for example, by selecting highly contrastive sounds such as /m/, /k/, /v/ each with a quite different lip or tongue position, and avoiding confusable sounds such as /m/ and /n/, or /p/ and /b/. It is also helpful to teach first the most consistent and common single letter- sound associations. Several workshops in this school in noida are organized for English teachers.

But single letter-to-sound correspondences are only the very first step in mastering phonics. In the English language we have 26 letters of the alphabet but there are approximately 44 speech sounds that need to be represented in print. It is therefore necessary to teach children the groups of letters used in combination (orthographic units) that are required to represent the other sounds. These combinations include digraphs which are two letters together that represent a single speech sound (e.g. ch, th, sh, ph, wh, -ck, -gh; consonants blends such as tr-, bl, sw, cr, etc. and larger units such as prefixes, suffixes and other units, for example, pre-, un-, -tion, -est, -ing.

For the highest level of proficiency in recognizing and spelling unfamiliar words, children need to be competent in working with longer and more complex letter-strings. In addition, there are numerous vowel digraphs and diphthongs that often give children problems when reading and spelling, these include ai,ie,ar,oa,oi,oo,au,ea,ee,ou,ue,oy. These units are best taught and practiced in the context of word families, where words sharing the common feature are compared and contrasted.

Once children have acquired functional decoding skills, and once they have built an adequate sight vocabulary, becoming fluent at word identification involves storing in memory relevant connections between common groups of letters within words and their pronunciation(e.g.-eed, -eat, -tch,- ing, dis-, pro-)

While students need to learn phonics, they also need to learn to look for the larger letter patterns in English that facilitate automatic decoding. They have to make the transition from ‘sounding out’ to fast automatic recognition of letter pattern chunks. The Best Nursery school in noida expressway believes that English has to be taught as first language.