4. What are the key phonic elements? List as many as you can and explain what they are.

What are the major approaches to teaching phonics? What are the advantages and disadvantage of each?

In order to answer this question I feel that it is first appropriate to define exactly what phonics is in order to break this further down for the reader. The question asks me to list and explain as many of phonic elements as I can, so to answer this question I will make a bulleted list that contains both the name of the element and a description out beside of it. The next part of the question asks me to name the major approaches to teaching phonics which I think will have to be an in-depth paragraph format answer. I will consult the Pearson Custom Education textbook to find these approaches. Finally I will imagine myself as a teacher of phonics who will be using the approaches so I will be able to answer the next part of the question which asks me to name advantages and disadvantages of each approach that I listed. To better organize this last answer I find it necessary to have each approach have its own paragraph discussing the advantages and disadvantages. A good starting statement is that without some knowledge of phonics a child cannot learn to read, simply because of the fact phonics are what makes the letter and the sounds they make come together to form words! Phonics is the foundation of reading that has to be built-up before reading can ever be understood. Having this in mind it can be stated fact that phonics may be the most important instruction that a reading teacher can include in the early emergent literacy programs. In primary age children having a good phonics instruction in place is what allows them to be able to sound out words that are new or unknown. This occurs because they know the sounds that the letters in the word make and should be able to put them together to come up with something whether correct or incorrect. In the same light phonics helps children spell out words because they almost can say them aloud and hear the sounds to determine what letters must be included. I would also like to note as a future special educator that many of the children I will have in my future classroom will need reading broke down into the smallest bits and I think phonics is always a good starting point! I also think that playing with phonics can be very visual and concrete which works well with many types of disabilities.

Using the Teaching Phonics, High-Frequency Words, and Syllabic Analysis chapter of the textbook I discovered that the key elements of phonics are: Consonants; There are twenty-five consonant sounds in the English language and they are often split into groups called diagraphs and clusters. Diagraphs very simply put are two letters that make one sound and a cluster Vowels; There are around sixteen vowel sounds in the English language and there are two common groups of these sounds called long vowels and short vowels. Onsets & Rimes; The onset is the first phoneme and the rime is often considered everything else in the word. As educators we can take different approaches in teaching phonics skills and elements to our beginning readers, there is an analytic approach and a synthetic approach. The analytic approach (202) is where the teacher uses whole words to teach consonant sounds instead of breaking it up for the student to pronounce only parts of the sounds. In the analytic approach the teacher does not change the pronunciations of any sounds by having the student say any parts without the whole word, they use the sound only in the way that it appears in the selected word. The analytical approach often uses embedded phonics instruction which means that phonics arent taught on a regular basis at just any time, lessons are brought forth as they come up in literature. Using the analytic approach children are likely to have a much larger sight vocabulary because of how often they are reading real words as it is supposed to sound and using whole language. However, it is a disadvantage that using this approach with the phonics instruction being embedded a lot of the isolated letters arent being cared about simply meaning of words and sentences. As well, a lot of words are a little more difficult and without this knowledge of phonics and rules you could misunderstand the whole situation of a story. The synthetic approach is especially helpful for beginning readers because it is the way children often use to discover an unknown word. This approach teaches the child opposite the way the analytic approach does because it does have the child sound out all the sounds then blend them into the selected word. Synthetic has its advantages because again the children are able to sound out more difficult words with this method and they also become much more familiar with the sounds each letter makes in the process! Using the synthetic

approach and having the children breaking down each individual sound that the letters make you can see how this would improve spelling in a very positive way because they are so familiar with the letter sounds. A downfall of this method is that through the focus all being on the letter sounds your child probably doesnt start the reading process with a large sight vocabulary. Phonics is vital for our children learning to read and there are a few key elements that we need to keep in mind such as vowel, consonant, onset, and rime. As educators we also have options to how we would like to teach phonics in our classrooms, the two approaches are synthetic and analytical. The synthetic approach is the child breaking down all of the sounds of a word as separate pronunciations then they should see a recognizable word. The analytical approach teaches the student to look at the whole word when sounding out the letter. These approaches both have a lot of backing evidence that they work as well as disadvantages.