Helping Parents Provide Phonics Support
For most schools, the first time you need to recruit help from your children’s parents is for phonics. It can be a tricky one because the parents themselves will not have learnt to read and write using a phonics system. As a result, much of the process and the terminology involved, will be new to them.
In this blog, we look at some of the most important things to consider.
Support understanding of parents
One of the best ways to help parents understand more about phonics is to give them a presentation or workshop about it. You’ll then be able to explain the learning process, the rationale behind it, and be able to answer any questions they have.
The presentation needn’t be extensive but would ideally cover the terminology (graphemes, phonemes, GPCs, blending, segmenting), the order the letters and sounds are taught in, what a typical lesson looks like, tricky words and a mention of the phonics screening check in Year 1. (Since this blog was published, we’ve created a presentation schools could use. Check it out here, and feel free to magpie sections you like!)
By inviting the parents in, ideally offering a couple of different time slots, you will have the parents’ undivided attention. Sending a presentation via email may feel more efficient, but you can’t guarantee busy, working parents will give it the time or attention needed.
Get them involved
Focus on sounds
At its earliest stages, phonics is all about sounds, and the children’s ability to speak, listen and understand. Parents have a huge role to play at this stage, so you should reinforce how vital their interactions are, and that by talking, listening and answering their child’s questions, they really are supporting their development.
Once the children can identify different sounds as they hear them, remember sounds that they’ve heard and can talk about sounds out of context, they are ready to move on to more formal letter recognition work.
It should be stressed to the parents at this point, that they in no way need to take the lead with the teaching and learning of phonics. In fact, if they allow their child to lead and teach them by telling them what they’ve learnt that day, it will give him or her a real confidence boost!
Drip feed activities
To reinforce your central role in phonics and avoid overwhelming the parents, it’s best to drip feed any phonics-based activities that you’d like them to do at home. These could be anything from finding household items that contain a particular phoneme in their name to playing I-spy.
You may be able to include these as ‘phonics exercises’ in your weekly update email if you have one. Alternatively, you could send slips home, detailing what you’d like them to do, via the children’s book bags.
Promote reading at home
When the children start to take books home, you need parents to respond positively and make sure the children have sufficient, distraction-free time to truly focus on it, so setting this expectation in the phonics presentation is a good idea.
Parents can help purely by listening patiently, so that the children gain good practice time.
If they can add to that by supporting the child to sound out the phonemes involved, that’s even better. They could even support their blending as they advance by playing the robot game. If, for example, the word was ‘stop’, they’d sound out ‘s-t-o-p’, as a robot would, to help their child then blend the sounds to make a comprehensible word.
Encourage them to inspire a love of reading
By sharing books with the children as much as possible, parents can inspire children to want to read and develop their enthusiasm for it. Our parents’ blog, “How to enjoy reading: 10 ways to encourage children to love reading” provides some great ideas about how to go about this. Share it with your children’s parents. Every family is unique so what works for one may not work for another. The blog provides plenty of options to try.
It’s equally important that the parents are seen to read too. Be that books, iPads, newspapers or magazines. This encourages the children to do the same and shows them that reading is an important skill that is not only useful but enjoyable too.
Inspire them to give their children praise
No matter how the children are doing with reading, encourage parents to reward the children with heaps of praise. There’s nothing more motivating than words of encouragement from a parent, and practice will make perfect in the end.
If reading is a chore to the children, it is difficult to motivate them to continue. Keep it fun, light-hearted and rewarding for them, and they will want to continue even if they find it doesn’t come easily.
Always have an open door
Making sure you’re there to support parents with phonics is vitally important. Whilst most parents will run with it, especially when they see their child’s reading skills developing week by week, others may struggle. Parents with different regional dialects, or indeed with different mother tongues, may need extra support.
A simple, two-minute conversation before or after classes, can often be all it takes to remove any confusion and provide the reassurance needed.
Summary
We hope this article has given you some new ideas or at least given you space to review how you currently involve your children’s parents where phonics is concerned.
Of course, if you’re a subscriber to Busy Things and have Home Access, you also have the option of sending Busy Things’ phonics activities home for your pupils to complete. This will give them additional practice.
If you’re not a subscriber but would like to see what these activities are like, we’d love you to take a free trial with us. To do so, simply click here. If you’d prefer an introduction via Zoom, we can do that too. Simply click here, providing us with details of your availability over the next week or so.