What is phonics?

Phonics is all about using sounds to read words. It gives new readers a toolkit to draw from when they encounter a word they've never seen before. Think of it as the relationship between letters and the sounds they make. At its core, phonics is a study of this relationship. Phonics shows your child how printed letters (or graphemes) represent the individual sounds (or phonemes) we hear in spoken language. For example, the letter b in the word bat makes the /b/ sound. This is the same sound we hear at the beginning of big, blue, and ball.