Teaching Phonics
Learning How to read
Home Schooling
Owletlearning
Learning Together
From the Comfort
of Your Home
Day by day guide - What to teach; suggested activities; words and sentences to use.
Resources - Words, sentences, games, worksheets and overviews to download
Videos - to illustrate ideas such as a split diagraph
Course 1
Young Owls
Listening and discriminating sounds
(for parents and carers of pre-nursery and nursery children)
Listening carefully is a vital skill to master before children can translate the different oral sounds (phonemes) into the written letters (graphemes).
This course will show you how to use different aspects of listening to tune into sounds, talk about them and to widen their vocabulary describing what they can hear.
We talk all the time to our children from birth but can we make this into 'Smarter' talking so that they learn better to listen more carefully and discriminate sounds accurately which they will have to do before they can access the next step, which is introducing sound and letter correspondence.
Children love books at this age and are very curious about the reading process, they have to have excellent skills in listening carefully first to discriminate the different sounds. This course will show you how to get them ready for reading.
Course 2
Infant Owls
Early Reading skills
(Course for parents and carers of Reception children)
I will show you how you can adapt the methods teachers in England use to teach children to do the massive leap from hearing sounds to seeing letters and translating these into words. Children have to learn a number of skills to be able to blend and segment letters so that they can decode these to begin to understand the meaning of them - there is a lot for them to learn and with this course you will be well equipped to know how to do so.
Wise Owls
(course for parents and carers of Year 1 children and any above who may need some support.)
This course will show you how to teach to read more graphemes (letter or letters that make a single sound), to decode more tricky graphemes such as split digraphs, to teach alternative spellings and pronunciations.
Additionally if your child does not enjoy more formal teaching methods, I have shown you how you can adapt learning activities to help your child practise their newly acquired reading skills in more fun games, including taking learning outdoors in a more active approach. Sometimes playing games such as football and incorporating practising reading new graphemes helps children remember and I will explain how you can do this.
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Expert Teacher
I am a teacher with over 20 years of experience in both private and state schools and I am putting the wealth of my knowledge of how reading and spelling is taught into an easy-to-follow guide for you to use.
Much of my teaching was in Early Years and Key Stage 1 so I have a lot of experience in the age range this course is aimed at, however I have taught in Key Stage 2 so I know how important it is for children to be independent and competent readers. It makes such a difference to their academic progress if they can access the higher level tasks and get on with their work independently because they can read without support.
The Course Benefits
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Online Community
My plan is to start an online Facebook community for you to join if you wish and exchange ideas with other parents and carers who may have similar questions, answers and experiences about teaching their child to read. Sometimes sharing ideas can help you and others so a community group with the same goals and ambitions such as teaching a child to read can be great where you can discuss what works well, what is helpful etc.
(Coming in Spring/ Summer 2021)
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Course content
You will have a comprehensive day-by-day course which you can access from the comfort of your own space. The easy-to-follow guide will have useful resources to help you know what sounds to teach, strategies to use, how to assess , what to teach next, what to look out for and so much more. If your child finds formal learning tricky and you would like to practise reading in a more fun way, I have designed games to print out and play and have suggested ways how you can use active tasks, such as football, to practise reading. This will help some children enormously and as you have probably only one or two to focus on you can customise their learning style specifically to how you practise decoding letters. I have also highlighted techniques in videos to demonstrate how I would teach different aspects.