Looking for tips on teaching Phonics and embedding learning in everyday moments?

Two experts, author and consultant Abigail Steel, and Amy McElhatton, share their top ideas and inspirations to help you make the most of your Phonics teaching and support young learners.

Phonics tips for teachers from Abigail Steel

For primary school teachers teaching Phonics for the first time, Abigail Streel recommends:

1. Trust your programme. It is all right if you might not feel confident because, as you teach the children, you will also be learning Phonics every day that you teach the lessons. Let your programme guide you and teach you.
2. Observe your children as much as possible. By being tuned into what is going on with them – watching them, listening to them, observing them – you will learn an awful lot about how you can use Phonics to help them progress.
3. Reading Planet books help teachers teach phonics because they provide lots of language-rich examples of words using the phonics. At the point that you are introducing a phoneme and a grapheme, there will be lots of words littered through the book in a natural context that helps to show the children how to apply those letters and sounds.

Watch Abigail’s video

Phonics tips for teachers from Amy McElhatton (the Phonics Fairy)

• Top advice for parents trying to understand Phonics: talk to your school, they will guide you into knowing what Phonics programme the school uses, any resources that you could be using at home, how best to support your child with their Phonics.
• Amy’s Top Three things that you can do: ask your child’s school what sounds they are teaching and get those sounds at home to practise with your kids; listen to them read from their story book each day that they bring home from school; and read to them.
• One thing you can start when you have very young children is blending: the process of putting the word back together after you have broken it down. When we learn to read, we say the sounds in a word, and we put it back together. Blending is a skill that we can really easily integrate. We can, for example, do some blending while we are out and about, breaking the word down and putting them back together again.

Watch Amy’s video

For information about Reading Planet and the Rocket Phonics programme, please contact our teams.

• For UK customers: primary@hachette.co.uk.
• For international customers: international.sales@hodder.co.uk.