Unik Edu Solution

Covers 3 crucial skills:

• Recognizing sound-letter relationship
• Children are taught the phonemes and the letters that represent them. This knowledge is important in understanding grapheme-phoneme correspondence.
• Examples: /s/-s /æ/-a /t/-t

• Blending sounds to form words
• Children are taught to blend sounds to form words. They say the sounds that make up a word and merge the sounds together until they can hear what the word is. This skill is vital in learning to read.
• Examples: /s/ + /æ/ + /t/ → /s't/ or 'sat'

• Segmenting words into individual sounds
• Children are also taught to segment, which is the opposite of blending. Children say a word and then break it up into the phonemes that make up the word. This skill is vital in being able to spell words.
• Examples: sat → /s/ + /æ/ + /t/
• Children also learn to recognize specific “tricky” words – words that are not spelt or pronounced according to the phonic “rules” that they are taught.
• Examples: a tap an apple

Covers lateral expansion of literacy development:

Children listen to two tongue twisters, two rhymes, and a song. The tongue twisters, rhymes and song have sounds that the learner has just learnt. Words are highlighted in red as they are read out.

Covers two practice exercises that reinforce learning. Covers the three crucial skills in phonics, i.e. sound-letter relationship, blending and segmenting.

Covers sound recognition:

Six words are introduced for each phoneme taught. Children can tap on the words to listen to their pronunciation.

To get the best results, we suggest that the child learns in the order shown below.

This is covered in the section, 'Sounds of Letters'. Here, the child learns the phonemes (sounds) of the English language, as well as the graphemes (letters) that correspond to those sounds.

This is the central part of learning to read, and is taught in the 'Lesson' section. When the child blends sounds to form a word, the child is, in effect, reading. When the child segments a word into its constituent sounds, the child is actually spelling. Tricky words - words that do not conform to phonics rules - are also taught in this section.

Maintain the child's interest with some vocal activities through 'Word Smart'. By engaging the child in stories, rhymes and songs that have relevance to what is taught, we accomplish two things: one, learning is reinforced; two, the child learns to appreciate language arts.

Put into practice what has been taught by doing the exercises in 'Let's Practise'. Two practice exercises are provided per topic to strengthen the 3 basic phonics skills:

• phonemic awareness
• blending/decoding
• segmenting/encoding

Apply phonics skills to read new words that have the phonemes already learnt, by following 'Let's Say It'.

Phonics is simply the connection between letter symbols and sounds. Using phonics, children are taught the relationships between letters and sounds. Children then use these relationships to read, write and speak words.

In linguistics, it is the study of speech sounds in all their aspects: how these sounds are produced by the speech organs (articulatory phonetics); how they are transmitted and how those transmissions can be analyzed (acoustic phonetics); how they are received by the ear and understood (auditory phonetics).

A lot of people confuse phonetics with phonics. This short write-up should help clear the confusion. Phonetics is the branch of linguistics which studies the use of sound in human language. It involves the study of the physical nature of speech sounds and speech production: how sounds are produced by the human body, what they are like as sound waves, and how the human ear processes speech.

Phonics is a method for teaching reading. The phonics method trains learners to use the relationship between sounds and letters in the English spelling system to help them decode words. To decode a word is to match the letters in the word to sounds in the language, thereby recognizing which word the letters spell. Decoding is nothing more than reading.

One reason why people confuse phonetics with phonics is that the word “phonetic” (or any of its derivatives) is sometimes used in ordinary language to mean something that is different from the linguistics sense. In ordinary language, for example, we may speak of the spelling system of Malay as being more phonetic than that of English. Or that 84% of English words are phonetically proven. In the two examples, we are not talking about the branch of linguistics; rather, we are talking about the regularity of the spelling system (i.e. how predictable the relationship between sounds and letters is).

Another cause of confusion is the use of the IPA (International Phonetic Alphabet) in both phonetics and phonics.

• When studying speech sounds in phonetics, linguists need to represent sounds in written form. To do this, each sound must be directly and uniquely represented by a “letter” (a one-to-one correspondence, i.e. one sound, one “letter”). This is to avoid any confusion as to how a word is pronounced. The “letters” that linguists use are a set of symbols called the phonetic alphabet, such as the IPA (one of many that are in use). Just take any good English dictionary. Word entries in the dictionary will no doubt have a pronunciation guide next to the entries, written in phonetic alphabet. For example, the entry for “elephant” might be:
  
  elephant ( /ˈɛlɪfənt/, /ˈɛləfənt/) a very large plant-eating mammal with a prehensile trunk, long curved ivory tusks, and large ears, native to Africa and southern Asia. It is the largest living land animal.
• Phonics also uses the IPA, for the same reason. When teaching a learner to read the word “lead”, for example, the teacher must know whether the word is pronounced “leed” (meaning, direct or take charge of) or “led” (the soft grey metal). The two pronunciations for “lead” are written in IPA as /li:d/ (“leed”) and /led/ (“led”). Therefore, by having a word written in IPA, teachers will know the correct pronunciation of that word.

It must be stressed, though, that children learning to read do NOT learn the IPA. The IPA is for the teacher to know, not the children. The IPA representation is a pronunciation reference for the teacher. In teaching reading using phonics, the teacher needs to know how phonemes sound and how words are pronounced. Using the IPA helps the teacher to sound out phonemes and words correctly. An example of the IPA chart (used for sounds of the English language) is shown below.

The British International Phonetic Alphabet chart

‘Blending’ means ‘joining together’. Blending letter sounds means joining the sounds of letters together. We blend sounds to make a word. Blending is an essential skill in learning to read. Click here to link to a video that explains blending using Phonics Fun.

‘Segmenting’ means ‘breaking’ or ‘separating’. When we segment a word, we break the word up into its individual sounds. Click here to link to a video that explains segmenting using Phonics Fun.

The International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) is an alphabetic system of phonetic notation based primarily on the Latin alphabet. It was devised by the International Phonetic Association as a standardized representation of the sounds of oral language. Though they are primarily designed for representing speech sounds, the IPA symbols are naturally also widely used for representing the phonemes of particular languages.

There are several approaches that use phonics as the basis of teaching reading: synthetic phonics, analytic phonics, analogy phonics, and embedded phonics.

Synthetic phonics

• The teaching of reading in which phonemes (sounds) associated with particular graphemes (letters) are pronounced in isolation and blended together (synthesised).
• Children are taught to take a single-syllable word, e.g. “cat”, apart into its three letters, pronounce a phoneme for each letter in turn /k, æ, t/, and blend the phonemes together to form a word.

Analytic phonics

• The teaching of reading in which the phonemes associated with particular graphemes are not pronounced in isolation.
• Children identify (analyse) the common phoneme in a set of words in which each word contains the phoneme under study. For example, teacher and pupils discuss how the following words are alike: pat, park, push and pen.

Analogy phonics

• A type of analytic phonics in which children analyse phonic elements according to the phonograms in the word.
• A phonogram, known in linguistics as a rime, is composed of the vowel and all the sounds that follow it, such as –ake in the word cake.
• Children use these phonograms to learn about “word families”, e.g. cake, make, bake, take.

Embedded phonics

• An approach in which phonics forms one part of a “whole language” programme.
• Embedded phonics differs from other methods in that the instruction is always in the context of literature rather than in separate lessons, and the skills to be taught are identified incidentally rather than systematically.

No. Phonics Fun teaches the 44 sounds used in English, and the relationship between these sounds and the letters of the alphabet. Learning the sounds and their relationship to letters allows the beginning reader to read and spell regular words, that is, words that follow standard phonics “rules”. In addition, the beginning reader also learns to read some sight words: words that occur often (high frequency words like ‘a’, ‘I’, ‘the’), and words that do not follow phonics roles (irregular words like ‘queue’, ‘plague’).

Application of phonics rules and recognizing sight words are two of the strategies used in Phonics Fun to teach reading. Using these strategies, the learner will acquire, by the end of the programme, sufficient reading skills to read grade-appropriate text.

Beyond this, however, the learner needs to be taught other reading strategies in order to decode much of the remaining English words that are not phonetically regular. These additional reading strategies are not taught in Phonics Fun, but in another programme, Beyond Phonics, which is not available online as yet.

Phonics Fun uses an approach that teaches children to read words in the shortest time possible. This is not done by teaching letters in alphabetical order. Rather, the letters are systematically grouped in an arrangement that allows the optimal number of words to be formed. Thus, ‘s’, ‘a’, ‘t’ and ‘p’, are taught first, from which the child can learn to read, for example, the words ‘as’, ‘sat’ and ‘tap’. The ability to read a few words from the very first lesson motivates the child to want to learn further.

In each lesson, only words that can be decoded at the level reached by the learner are presented for the learner to read. Words with sounds/letters that have not been taught are not put in the reading list. For example, the sound /k/ and the letter ‘k’ are taught in Topic 3. In that lesson, the word ‘kit’, which is formed from /k/, /ɪ/ and /t/, is introduced. The child has already learned /t/ in Topic 1, and /ɪ/ in Topic 2. The word ‘kit’ is therefore decodable at this level. This strategy enables the child to read new words without difficulty.

In Phonics Fun, children are taught to both read and spell right from the start.

Phonics Fun is based on the teaching guidelines drawn up by the U.K.’s Department for Education. The programme covers the 44 phonemes, or sounds, in the English language, and their associated graphemes, or written representations.

The contents also meet the KSSR syllabus requirements drawn up by the Ministry of Education, Malaysia.

Phonics Fun helps teachers to teach reading in two ways:

1. By providing teachers with a convenient and simple way to learn and master phonics skills.
2. By providing teachers with a model for teaching reading using phonics.

Phonics Fun teaches the fundamentals of phonics and reading:

• Sounding out all 44 phonemes (sounds) of the English language, and the relationship of these phonemes to graphemes (“symbols” or letters), within 15 lessons.
• Blending sounds and segmenting words to develop reading and spelling skills.
• Recognizing words that do not follow phonics “rules” (irregular words)
• Recognizing words that occur frequently, by sight (high frequency words)

In effect, Phonics Fun provides a “teaching template” that you can easily use and follow. This “template”:

• helps overcome “teacher’s block”
• indirectly provides teachers with skills to teach reading using systematic synthetic phonics

Phonics Fun helps teachers in two ways:

1. Tools: Phonics Fun uses technology to teach reading in innovative and creative ways. It allows students to take charge of their own learning through direct exploration, expression, and experience, shifting the student’s role from ‘‘being taught’’ to ‘‘learning’’, and the teacher’s role from ‘‘expert’’ to ‘‘collaborator’’ or ‘‘guide’’.

2. Time: Phonics Fun allows for self-learning by students, thereby freeing some of the teachers’ time. If there is a shortage of time in class, students can make up for it by extending the lessons through informal learning at home.

No. Although Phonics Fun allows for self-learning by students, it is not intended to replace the teacher in the classroom. Instead, it is designed to complement the teacher’s work by providing her with an innovative and engaging resource.

Phonics Fun helps to change teachers’ pedagogic practices from a teacher-centred model to a student-centred one. Teachers can play Phonics Fun lessons in class and ask students to answer the pre-designed interactive questions. There are three interactive practices for each lesson and most of the questions are randomised.

Teachers can also use Word Smart (a section in Phonics Fun) to develop wider reading skills in the students. Word Smart helps in literacy development through the use of sentences, songs, rhymes or stories that reinforce the sounds that students have learnt in a lesson. Words are highlighted in red as they are read out.

Yes. There are two ways to run Phonics Fun in the classroom: play the CD-ROM version, or run the online (Internet) version using a broadband connection.

To play the CD-ROM version, you need to preinstall the programme first (a one-time installation) and run the CD-ROM in the CD drive. Since this does not require an Internet connection, you will have a disruption-free lesson. Click here to know more about the purchase of CD-ROM.

The online version, on the other hand, saves you from having to install the programme on your computer, and can be run wherever there is a broadband connection. Click here to know more about subscribing to the online programme.

Phonics Fun teaches children how to read using a scientifically-based approach that has been proven to be effective. For example, lessons are taught from simple to complex, are fun-filled to capture attention, and have practices that are repeated using different approaches to reinforce learning.

Phonics Fun also applies what is known from neuroscience about how the brain learns and combines that knowledge with technology, psychology, educational content and pedagogy to design lessons that match the children's mental and physical development. Our brain learns best when it is taught in a systematic and structured way through an interactive and multisensory approach, and superior learning takes place when learning activities are enjoyable.

In short, Phonics Fun focuses on how children learn, so that they can learn in the most effective way.

We suggest that teachers pre-assign classwork before a lesson (provided students also have access to the programme). When class begins, teachers can start their lesson with students having some understanding about the lesson being taught. Click Level 1 or Level 2 to download the relevant content of Phonics Fun.

Phonics Fun applies the TPACK (Technological, Pedagogical and Content Knowledge) framework in its teaching strategy. Click here to download the PDF on how we integrate TPACK in different sections in Phonics Fun.