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International research consistently
shows that, when it comes to developing a love of reading, children who are
helped at home get a head start. From an early age, they learn that reading is
fun and important.
The evidence is so compelling that
governments often require schools to run information evenings for parents of
young children. These evenings largely focus on how to make reading fun and
enjoyable, through sharing familiar books on a daily basis (usually with the
parent and child starting each reading session with some discussion about the
book’s cover and title). Parents are encouraged to then concentrate on the
meaning of the text through reading the words together and asking questions
about the characters and events in the stories (usually with the parents and/or
child pointing at the words and the colourful pictures).
As the children gain in confidence, parents are advised to encourage their
children to choose favourite books to read on their own (reading the books aloud
or silently). Ideally, the children are asked to re-tell what they have read and
to point out the relevant words and text.
If a child is unable to read a word,
schools advise parents to help their child ‘sound it out’, by using letter
sounds and not the names of letters. In this way, children (from as young as the
age of five) are encouraged to sound out the words that they cannot read by
using simple phonics (by giving each letter one sound).
Simple phonics may be fine for words like ‘cat’, ‘dog’ and
‘ant’ but problems arise when the children try to sound out basic words like
'he', 'she', ‘my’, ‘see’, ‘was’ and ‘said’ – not to mention many thousands of other English words
- in which the letters do not represent
the one sound that has been taught. These words often include letters in groups
of two, three and four that represent only one sound. Many parents are not
confident with the sounds and spellings in these words because they do not have
a good understanding of the 44 sounds of English and their key spelling choices.
Busy teachers do not normally have the time to provide a course for parents on
the 44 sounds of English and their key spelling choices, especially a course
that meets the needs of all parents (including those with gifted and talented
children, those who have children with a specific or special educational need
and those learning English as an additional language).
In addition, many parents are not familiar with the words phoneme, grapheme, keygrapheme,
graph, digraph, trigraph and quadgraph. These terms are commonly used by
teachers and other professionals when teaching phonics to children.
If children do not develop an
awareness of the 44 sounds and their key spelling choices, they often become
adults who have difficulty with reading and/or spelling or, as parents, teaching
assistants, student teachers, speech therapists, educational psychologists,
lecturers and inspectors, lack the skills and confidence to teach others beyond
simple phonics.
The SOUND IT OUT software uses
keywords to help learners understand the 44 sounds and 120 key spelling choices
of English. This gives them the building blocks to read and spell lots of other
words.
The software is suitable for
children (aged 4+) and adults.
Videos
and User Guide
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