Phonics is a system for teaching kids to read by decoding the sounds in a word. The English alphabet has 26 letters and 40 or more sounds. The letters in our alphabet represent sounds also called phonemes. A word like cat has three phonemes. C, A, and T.

Since there are more sounds than letters in English, combinations of letters are also used to create unique sounds, like the /th/ sound or the /sh/ sound. These are called digraphs.

Teaching the sounds that letters make alone or in combination gives children the ability to read words they don't recognize by sight. So, one advantage to using phonics for kids is that it is simpler than trying to memorize every word in the English language by sight alone.

The whole word approach teaches children to memorize each word individually. Can you imagine simply being shown words and memorizing each and every one!

But, there are some words that don't follow the "rules" of phonics and so kids are taught to memorize them by sight. Today nearly all phonics programs also include an element of the whole word or sight word approach.

My daughter's phonics program also encouraged her to memorize some of the most frequently used words so that she could begin to read more fluently. These were words like "to," "from," "the," "said," "go," etc.

Phonics gives your kids the knowledge of how the English language and the alphabet works. Phonics also teaches how the system of written language was developed.

A huge benefit of this understanding of the sounds of letters and digraphs, is that it gives kids the skills to decode unfamiliar words. They can also start reading independently more quickly.

Your child can usually decipher some of the word and figure it out from context, even if the phonics rules don't completely work for the word.

Once my daughter reached a certain level of understanding with the phonics rules, it was as if she just "got it." The light bulb went on and she flew through her phonics lessons. Today at age 7, she has just finished reading the Little House on the Prairie series.

Another benefit of teaching phonics is that it also helps with spelling. Although spelling rules and phonics rules don't exactly correspond, I've noticed that children that learned the phonics rules understand how a word is most likely spelled.

Teaching phonics for kids, then, is really just a systematic way to teach the sounds of letters and combinations of letters. Using this knowledge kids can sound out many unfamiliar words, and can be better spellers as well.