When learning about phonics sounds, it's important to remember the sheer number of ways different letters can produce different sounds.
To start off with, the English language is composed of 44 key sounds, called phonemes.
These phonemes, or sounds, can be spelled in 120 different ways. Learn the sounds that these 120 different combinations of letters make and your child will have an excellent foundation for reading.
That sounds challenging, but it's significantly less challenging than memorizing the thousands of words that comprise a working vocabulary.
Here's a good example of this concept. The sound /s/ can be represented in many different ways. Sun, dress, city, cell, and horse all have the same /s/ sound, but spelled in different ways.
So what can you do? Learn to memorize the different graphemes. There are a few main stages to this process.
1. Letter recognition: It is critical that your child can accurately name and find different letters before starting the process of phonics. That is, they can name all the letters of the alphabet and have a good visual memory for them. I have a few good games for this, and you can turn it into a really fun process:
a. Letter match: Buy some alphabet magnets and flashcards. Pour the alphabet magnets on the floor. Hold up a flash card, and see how fast your child can find the letter and run to put it on the fridge.
b. Alphabet Mats: Alphabet foam mats that you can play with are very tactile and a hit with kids.
c. Newspaper search: Hold up a flashcard and see how many times you can find that letter in the newspaper.
2. Letter writing skills: Learning to write the English language is very important. I don't think it's necessarily needed for reading, but a lot of people think that learning to write the letters helps facilitate the reading process.
3. Accurately articulate the phonemes on the grapheme chart: So a child would know that /s/ makes a "sss" sound, /b/ makes a "buh" sound.
4. Learn all the graphemes and the sounds they make: The phoneme-grapheme chart will help facilitate this, because by looking at the phoneme in the start of the column, and the graphemes listed next to it, they will know that the graphemes make the same sound as the initial phoneme. There are a lot of sites with good phoneme-grapheme charts out there.
5. Practice blending the letters together/reading skills with decodable readers
This is just a quick explanation of the process of learning phonic sounds.
