Phonics, explained without the jargon

The short version

Phonics means teaching children the sounds that letters make, then joining those sounds up into words.
When your child gets stuck on a word, help them sound it out — do not tell them to guess from the picture.
Ask your school which phonics scheme they use, and follow it. Different schemes teach the sounds in a different order.

What is phonics?

Phonics is how children are taught to read in English primary schools.

The idea is simple. Letters stand for sounds. If you know the sounds, you can work out a word you have never seen before.

The government describes it as teaching children three things:

the sound each single letter makes
the sounds that letter pairs make, like sh or oo
how to blend those sounds together, left to right, to make a word

That third one is the important bit. Knowing the sounds is no use on its own. The skill is running them together fast enough that c–a–t turns into cat.

So what does that look like at home?

Your child brings home a book. They get to a word they do not know. What do you do?

Say: "sound it out." Point at the letters, left to right, and let them make each sound. Then ask them to say it faster until it sounds like a word.

Do not say: "look at the picture." This is the single most common mistake, and the government guidance names it directly. It tells parents to encourage children to sound out unfamiliar words and blend them, "rather than looking at the pictures to guess."

Guessing feels like it is working, because the child often gets the word right. But they have not read it. They have looked at a picture of a dog and said "dog". The next time that word appears without a picture, they are stuck again.

Once they have got the word, talk about it. Ask what it means. Help them keep track of the story. Reading is not just decoding — it is understanding. But the decoding comes first.

What are those odd little books the school sends home?

They are called decodable readers, and they are not the same as a story book.

A decodable reader is written using only the sounds your child has been taught so far. That is why they can seem strange, or thin, or oddly worded. It is deliberate. Every word in the book is a word your child can work out.

That is the point. Your child is meant to be able to read it. If they are guessing at half of it, something has gone wrong and the school will want to know.

Keep reading proper stories to them as well. Your child's own reading book and the book you read to them at bedtime are doing two different jobs. Do not swap one for the other.

Which sounds first? Ask the school

This is the one piece of advice worth following above everything else on this page.

Schools use different phonics schemes. The schemes teach the same sounds, but in a different order, and sometimes with different actions or names for them.

If you buy a phonics book set that teaches the sounds in a different order from your school, you can confuse your child. They will meet a sound they have not been taught and think they should already know it.

So ask. One sentence at the school gate: "Which phonics scheme do you use?" Every teacher can answer it instantly. Then anything you buy or borrow can match.

Things that help, and are cheap

Magnetic letters on the fridge. Being able to move letters around physically helps a lot. Build a word, then change one letter and see what happens. cat becomes cot becomes cop.

A reading record. Most schools send one. Use it. It is how the teacher finds out that a book was too hard, or that your child loved it and wants more like it. Teachers read them.

A book bag habit rather than a book bag rule. Ten minutes most days beats an hour on Sunday.

Practising the sounds

Children need to hear a sound, see the letters, and use them. Anything that makes that a game rather than a drill is worth more than a worksheet.

🔒 We do not have a game that does this, and we are not going to pretend otherwise.

We have a word game called Sound Ladder, and the name makes it sound perfect for this page. It is not. It is a puzzle about words that are spelled differently but sound the same, it is scored on speed, and it is built for children of seven and up who can already read. Pointing a parent of a five-year-old at it because the title has the word "sound" in it would be the wrong advice.

What we do have, for slightly older children, is Word Mixer — jumbled letters you put back into order. That is spelling practice, not phonics, and it is for a child already past the early stages.

For the sounds themselves, the magnetic letters on your fridge and the book bag from school are better than anything on a screen, including ours.

What if my child is finding it hard?

First: say something. Tell the teacher.

Phonics is taught in small groups and teachers track it closely. If your child is struggling, the school almost certainly knows, and if they do not, they need to. There is no advantage in waiting to see.

Second: keep reading to them. A child who is finding reading hard can very quickly decide that books are a place where they fail. The story you read at bedtime, where they do not have to do anything, is what stops that happening.

Third: do not panic about the pace. Children learn to read at different speeds, and the ones who take longer often catch up completely.

Where this comes from

Phonics screening check: information for parents, Standards and Testing Agency, Crown copyright
This is where the description of phonics, the advice about sounding out rather than guessing, and the explanation of decodable readers come from.
The Reading Framework, Department for Education, July 2023. This is the long document written for schools. We checked this guide against it. You do not need to read it.

Contains public sector information licensed under the Open Government Licence v3.0.

About us

And who we are: CrumbJar is a British puzzle-games studio. We make daily word and number games that children and adults play on a screen, and the games are free. So we have an interest in you thinking well of screens, and an interest in you buying things through our links. We would rather you knew that than found out.