In the year 1570, a man by the name of John Hart found that the foundation of phonics is the relationship between letters and sounds. Before this discovery, children learned to read from a known text in which they named the letters in each word. Since 1570, our ways of teaching our students phonics have certainly changed. Students are now taught phonics using a method called Systematic Phonics. This method provides students with strategies that teach them how to put together graphemes (letters) with phonemes (sounds) in a set sequence that teaches them how to read and spell.
The process begins with the simplest sound in a word and builds the word from there - patterns to syllables and then the whole word. Students then can transfer these skills into reading text and using context clues to decode the unknown word.
Two programs currently being used in small group reading groups are Phonics Boost and SPIRE. Both systematic programs have proven to be successful with our intermediate students.
