Your Child Already Knows Words. Lots of Words.

They’ve already spent years learning to talk and understand spoken language.

So when you say a word, they probably already know what it means.

Let’s take dog.

When you say “dog“, your child knows what you’re talking about. They don’t need to think about the word itself. They’re thinking about the thing it represents — a dog 🐕.

But knowing the spoken word dog doesn’t mean they can look at this:

dog

and read it.

So what has to happen in between?

That’s where phonics comes in.

Phonics teaches children how the sounds in the words they already know connect to the letters they see on the page — and how to use that connection to read words for themselves.

How?

1. First, they need to start noticing sounds

Let’s go back to the word dog.

When someone says “dog“, you probably hear one sound, a single word.
Why wouldn’t you? You’re listening to understand what the word means.

But listen to it again, this time paying attention to the sounds inside it:

🔊 dog

Now more slowly:

🔊 d — o — g

There are three separate sounds in there.

You probably didn’t think about that the first time you heard dog. Why would you?

But those three sounds are important, because they’re the building blocks of the spoken word.

And this is something your child needs to start discovering:

The words they say aren’t just whole words. They’re made up of smaller sounds.

Cat can become:

🔊 c — a — t

Sun can become:

🔊 s — u — n

Fish can become:

🔊 f — i — sh

And this is where some of those early phonics activities that don’t seem to have much to do with reading begin to make sense.

Before asking children to look closely at the sounds inside words, they’re given lots of opportunities to notice and play with sound.

They listen for sounds around them.
They copy sounds.
They make sounds.
They notice sounds that are the same or different.
They play with rhythm and rhyme.

And more and more, we can draw their attention to the sounds in spoken language.

What sound can you hear at the beginning of sun?
Do cat and hat sound the same at the end?
Can you hear the different sounds in dog?

They’re beginning to listen to spoken words in a different way — not just for what the word means, but for the sounds they can hear inside it.

But how does any of this help my child read?

Well, the sounds aren’t the end of the story.

They’re what we’re going to connect to the letters.

2. Next, those sounds get connected to letters

Your child has been seeing letters for years.

On cereal boxes. Road signs. Books. Their clothes. Their own name.

But being able to see this:

d

isn’t the same as knowing what information that mark is giving them.

Phonics begins to make that connection.

Your child learns that the sound:

🔊 /d/

can be represented in writing by:

d

The sound:

🔊 /o/

can be represented by:

o

And:

🔊 /g/

can be represented by:

g

Then the sounds we found inside the spoken word:

🔊 d — o — g

can be represented on the page:

d o g

Those letters are no longer just marks.

They’re giving your child information about the sounds in the word.

And that’s the connection at the heart of phonics:

The words we speak are made from sounds, and those sounds can be represented in writing.

3. Now the letters can help them work out a word

Once your child knows some of those sound-and-letter connections, something quite remarkable becomes possible.

They don’t have to have seen and memorised every written word before.

With phonics, they can start to work words out.

And that matters because your child is going to meet thousands of written words. They can’t wait for someone to tell them what every new word says.

Phonics gives them a way to have a go at working it out for themselves.

They see:

d o g

They’ve learned the sounds these letters can represent, so they can turn the letters into:

🔊 d — o — g

But they’re not quite reading dog yet.

They’ve got one more job to do.

4. They put the sounds back together

They have:

🔊 d — o — g

Now they need to push those separate sounds together:

🔊 d — o — g

🔊 dog

And suddenly they hear something familiar.

🔊 Dog!

It’s the same spoken word they’ve known for years.
Except this time nobody had to tell them what the written word said.

They worked it out from the sounds represented by the letters.

They’ve read it.

And that’s really what phonics is helping your child learn to do.

If we strip away all the terminology, the journey looks something like this:

I know spoken words
🔊 dog
↓
I discover that words are made from sounds
🔊 d — o — g
↓
I learn that those sounds can be represented by letters
d o g
↓
When I see the letters, I know which sounds to say
🔊 d — o — g
↓
I put the sounds together
🔊 dog
↓
I recognise the word
🐕 Dog!

Everything else we’re going to talk about — listening games, letter sounds, blending and eventually those first reading books — fits somewhere into this phonics journey.

So you don’t need to know all the phonics terminology before you can help your child.

You need to understand what your child is trying to do.

And now that we have the big picture, we can look at what phonics looks like for your child in Nursery and Reception and what you can do to help them at home.