Your family plays a big role in helping your child learn to read and write. With the right phonics activities at home, you can support your child’s literacy development and academic success. The more you understand how and why phonics instruction works, the better you can facilitate effective and meaningful learning experiences with your family.
To help your child practice phonics at home, read our insights for parents below! You can also browse our phonics program reviews for more.
Most people assume phonics and hearing loss don’t belong in the same sentence. After...
Your toddler points at the dog, lights up with excitement, but stays silent. Meanwhile,...
There’s a moment that many first-grade parents describe with the same kind of wonder,...
There is a well-documented shift that occurs around third grade, which literacy researchers have...
Here’s something that surprises many parents: phonics learning doesn’t begin in kindergarten. It begins...
If you’ve ever sat at a kindergarten pickup wondering whether your child is keeping...
You’ve just announced that your school is implementing a new systematic phonics program. You...
If you’re a parent whose child is struggling to read, you might wonder why...
The Right to Read Act, introduced in Congress, is an effort by lawmakers to...
Your third grader still struggles to decode simple words. Your English language learner confuses...
If you’re reading this because something feels off with your child’s reading, trust that instinct. Roughly one in five kids in any classroom shows signs of dyslexia, and most won’t…
If you’ve already sat through an IEP meeting and walked out feeling like the reading goals were soft, vague, or weirdly disconnected from what your child actually needs, you’re not…
When your child writes “sip” instead of “ship,” they’re not making a careless mistake. They’re missing a small but important skill. They haven’t yet learned that two letters, “s” and…
If you’ve spent any time in early literacy circles, you’ve probably noticed something strange: people argue about sight words. One camp says memorizing sight words is essential. Another says it’s…
Among kindergarten teachers, word sorting holds a quiet kind of reverence. It asks for nothing more than a small pile of word cards and a child willing to look closely,…
Most parents and teachers think of reading and writing as separate skills taught at different times of day. Reading comes first, the thinking goes, and writing follows once a child…
Walk into any kindergarten classroom, and you will see two very different books being handed to children learning to read. One says, “Sam can tap. Sam can nap.” The other…
When a child learns the short /a/ sound on Monday, blends CVC words on Tuesday, tackles digraphs on Wednesday, and then never returns to short /a/ again, something strange happens.…
Imagine handing a child a jigsaw puzzle with no picture on the box and no guidance about where to begin. A few kids might figure it out eventually, but most…
Here’s something that might surprise you: the order of a phonics lesson matters almost as much as the content inside it. A child who sits down for 20 minutes of…
