After your child/student has a good phonemic and phonetic awareness, start teaching patterns and “chunking.”

Chunking is when you look at a word and identify letter combinations and patterns in the word. You can teach chunking for: blends, digraphs, vowel-consonant-e patterns, prefixes and suffixes.

The idea is to move your child/students beyond the phase of sounding out each letter into recognizing patterns and sounding out the new pattern as a whole.

For example, you teach the digraphs: ch, ph, sh, th, wh, and the new sound these letter combinations make. When the student sees the letter combination in the word “ship,” he or she sounds it out /sh/i/p/–not /s/h/i/p/.

This is a big step in teaching reading. Have your students look at the whole word before sounding it out to see if they recognize any letter combination patterns.