Cheryl Lundy Swift

Developing strong phonics skills in the early grades is essential for students to become fluent, independent readers. The science of reading shows us that when children know the letters of the alphabet and the sounds they make both alone and in combination with each other, they’re ready to use those building blocks to decode and read increasingly complex words and sentences. Much of phonics instruction involves practice and repetition.

Over the years, literacy education has experienced a number of shifts as the pendulum has swung from phonics to whole language instruction, to balanced literacy, and now back to a structured approach to literacy grounded in phonics. When I went to school in the late 1970s, it was common to teach students how to read by teaching them to recognize entire words rather than their constituent parts.