What Is Phonics? A Guide for Educators and Families

Are you teaching readers? You need to know this.

Why is phonics important?

Phonics is the basis for decoding, or what’s often called “sounding out” words. Decoding is what happens when a reader looks at a word in print and uses the sounds of each letter to figure out what it says. Phonics is also at the heart of encoding, which is attaching letters to the sounds in a spoken word in order to write it down. Reading research tells us that humans use multiple areas of their brains to put together spoken sounds, written symbols, and the meaning of words in order to read and write.