A little while ago I went on a phonics course with some colleagues of mine. Being a Year 5 teacher for majority of my teaching career I didn't have a huge knowledge base of phonics and how they worked. At uni I was not taught about the importance of learning sounds and having a structured programme. Being Russian born and having a very phonetic language structure I found English difficult to learn. Russian letters have one sound, so if you see it, that's how you say it. English has too many sounds for the same letter. For every rule there is a list of exceptions. So I wish that I had been taught to read and write in English using a phonics system and I wish this was taught at uni so that I could pass that on to my students.
We took part in a course run by Yolanda Soryl. She is a primary school teacher who went through the same dilemma as most teachers in NZ. She understood that some children don't instinctively know the sound that letters make and need to be taught the rules and patterns that make up the English letters.
She took us through the importance of learning to distinguish sounds (drum, car, bird) as a toddler and how this knowledge can then translate to distinguishing between letter sounds. We then moved on to learning about the basic structure of teaching children the sounds of letters, progressing to beginning and end wounds of words. We finally ended with middle sounds and letter combinations to make spelling much easier as it became a system rather than a guessing game.
The teaching process for these was repetitive but effective. I found that the students in my class now use the techniques that we learned together (I was learning along with them as it was so new to me also). So overall I think this was a great experience for me and my future students.
Thank you Yolanda for a very stimulating lesson.
