Don’t wait until they start school.
 

When children start school in England, they are taught through a whole-class synthetic phonics programme. This is mandated.

These programmes teach a core set of around 100 grapheme–phoneme correspondences, with the expectation that children will use this knowledge to work out the rest of the code for themselves.

Some children do. But at least 1 in 5 struggle to make that transition. They may not retain or apply what they’ve been taught, and can quickly fall behind without the right support.

At the same time, another 1 in 5 are capable of moving ahead. They are held back by the pace and repetition of whole-class teaching, despite being ready to progress.

I understand that parents and teachers want a programme they can follow. You will soon be able to simply work through the books, with activities that support those books.

But the journey to get started depends on the child.

The groundwork matters more than you might realise, especially for the 1 in 5 at risk. We need to secure their phonemic awareness first and ensure they are confident using Phonemies®, as they will rely on them as a visual for sounds they may struggle to hear, order and blend, at least initially. That can be overcome.

Other children will move through this quickly. That difference is not about intelligence or oral language skills.

Every child needs a personalised learning journey.

Something you may not realise at first is that, although you can read, your brain has in some ways forgotten the work it did to get you there. You can decode and spell any as easily as and, many as easily as man, put as easily as cut. etc You can read The Chaos Poem! Children don't learn how to do that through explicit instruction. 
 

I will show you how to ensure your child can do this without learning rules or memorising words. That means letting go of preconceived ideas about how reading and spelling should be taught. I’ll show you what phonics programmes are trying to achieve, but in a way that feels natural to even the youngest child’s brain.
 

Amari has just turned three, last week, and we will follow his journey. I’d love you to share yours too. The more we share, the easier it becomes to understand what is happening in children’s brains when learning is experienced as play.

This is about helping children move into the self-teaching phase as early as possible. When they can work out how speech and print connect, they begin building their own word bank, storing thousands of words during the most important years for learning to read, from birth to seven.

Your child will understand this, and you will understand this by watching them. Your job is to guide the process, learning with them. Let go of the idea of 'teaching' in the traditional sense, and embrace   

Let’s work together to get your child reading and enjoying reading.