Phonics Power: Reading Foundations for Early Readers

Your child learns how to connect written letters to spoken sounds and to sound out and read new words all by themselves. Specifically, a child will learn these core skills: Letter Sounds: They learn that every letter (like A or M) has a specific sound (a "phoneme"). Blending: They learn to stretch individual sounds and put them together to read a whole word. For example: the sounds /c/ - /a/ - /t/ blend together into the word "cat". Segmenting: They practice breaking spoken words apart into tiny sounds to help them spell. Digraphs: They discover that some sounds are made by two letters working together, such as "sh" in ship or "ch" in chat. Vowel Rules: They learn that vowels (A, E, I, O, U) can make short sounds (like in cat) and long sounds (like in cake).