EZY Phonics

We’re thrilled! Our vibrant EZY Phonics Educator's shirts have arrived, and we love the way they look! 🎁

Whole language development goes beyond mastering general reading and writing techniques. By establishing the right speech skills early, children can express feelings confidently, articulate their needs clearly and understand others with greater depth. This understanding brings about significant emotional and behavioural development. 💬

In this week's post, Teacher Sharon sharpens the expressive language skills of her students at a Planetarians preschooler’s class. She extracts a key dialogue from the popular children's storybook "A Squash and a Squeeze" and starts an interactive role-play activity with her class. She assigns a character from the story to each student and assumes the role of the narrator, to encourage her young explorers to follow suit using the phonological skills they've been taught. This way, her students gain the edge of confidence to speak not just from a captivating story, but in an environment that encourages psychological safety.

💡 Speech Tip:
The best way to encourage your child’s speech development is to do a lot of talking together about things that interest your child. In the first few years, children develop many of the oral language skills that help them to learn to read when they go to school. By the time children are five years of age, most people should understand all of what they say, even though they might still mispronounce a few words. For example, they might still have problems saying sounds like the /r/, /l/ or /th/ sound. They might say ‘ling’ or 'wing' instead of ‘ring’ or ‘tink’ instead of ‘think’. Children learn new skills over time and at different ages. Most children develop skills in the same order and each new skill they learn builds on the last. Small differences in when children develop skills are usually nothing to worry about.

📣 Learn more about how we develop our Planetarians (ages 6-7) at: bit.ly/3hGpAJh

Children’s day is a reminder that every child is unique and deserves the best of everything. Children are the building blocks of the future and hence, our world depends on how much we invest in nurturing them today. The children of today will make the world of tomorrow. EZY Phonics wishes all children, near and far, a Happy Children’s Day! 💖

To all the kids: Chin up, smile and celebrate the day dedicated specially to you! 🥳

Like seatbelts, punctuations can save lives. 👀

Meet Teacher Sharon: celebrated early childhood educator, master puppeteer, ingenious phonics instructor and enthralling storyteller – all in one.

💡 Storytelling is one of the most effective ways to carry educational value to children. It delivers meaning, context and understanding in the world of early learning. Because of this, Teacher Sharon uses plenty of stories to reach the hearts of her students. Beyond simply reading a story, we reinforce the teaching instruction through the art of ‘Interactive Storytelling’. In this post, Teacher Sharon poses against a giant farmhouse backdrop with props in hand and cap on head. Here she brings the learning of the /l/ sound to life by leveraging on visual themes and the popular children’s book by Julia Donaldson: “What the Ladybird Heard”. Teaching through interactive stories will stay with children much longer than a direct and regular teaching instruction. If the teaching instruction involves excellent storytelling, any concept that children are taught will be remembered for years to come.

📣 Not sure how to get started? See our selection of books for kids of all ages: https://www.ezyphonics.com/post/the-best-books-for-kids-of-all-ages-an-educator-s-perspective

Teacher Sharon leads a Cosmonauts class in this post with a sneaky spiderweb and asks the question, “Are you afraid of spiders?”, to which her students eagerly reply "Yes!" Then she puts their thoughts to words and writes on a small draftboard, “Yes I am” and guides them to read the written phrase. She eventually coaches them to write the phrase for themselves during the class. This explicit action of showing the writing process to children while writing is known as model writing. ✍️

Children gain knowledge and interest in writing as they are continually exposed to books and writing stimulation in their environment. One of the first words kids are usually taught to write is their name. Names are meaningful and children typically are interested in learning to write the letters in their name. Name writing proficiency provides a foundation for other literacy knowledge and skills as it reinforces alphabet knowledge, letter writing and spelling concurrently.

📣 Writing Tip:
Preschoolers of all levels benefit from daily writing experiences, so it is helpful to introduce some measure of writing in the daily routine, such as having your child write (or attempt to write) their names during casual times. This also consequently helps develop fine motor skills and promote the joy of experimenting with the art of writing, regardless of the child’s current skill level.

☑️ Visit us at https://bit.ly/3E5kYpx to learn more about our programmes.

Teaching children online involves establishing clear channels and creative rules of engagement. Before our students arrive in our online learning rooms, we spend a considerable amount of time developing engaging lesson plans and designing visual themes that will keep them interested and immersed. Kids always look forward to high-quality, engaging and interactive lessons with a teacher who really cares about them. 💖

At EZY Phonics, we love changing the settings of our teaching instruction on the fly as circumstances require. No two lessons are the same for us, both visually and in terms of delivery.

📣 Learn more about how we create a sustainable and engaging online learning experience for our children: https://www.ezyphonics.com/post/how-children-can-truly-learn-online

Phonics refers to the method of teaching a student to read by developing their phonemic awareness and an understanding of the links between the sounds and how we use the letters of the alphabet to represent them. With our younger kids however, it can often be difficult to give them an anchor to ‘hold on’ to the different sounds of the language.

📣 Phonics Tip:
To help build such an anchor to these sounds, which will later help in linking sounds to written letters, actions are often connected to each sound to aid in memorising them. This is especially useful in the early stages as it works well for the most basic of sounds. For instance, when making the /m/ sound, children could be taught to rub their tummies as if they have eaten something delicious, like a juicy orange, while saying “mmmmm”. Or, they could open their mouths wide as if they were eating an apple while saying the /a/ sound. It is simple to come up with visual actions to go along with the various sounds of the English language and to then teach these to your child.

🌟 Tip-in-a-tip:
Ensure that you consistently use the same actions every time for a specific sound to help avoid confusion in your child. This helps maintain the association of the sound with the letter itself.

☑️ Our early literacy programmes combine these tips and more! Visit us at https://bit.ly/3E5kYpx to discover in-depth about what we offer children aged 3 to 8.

Teaching the letter S and it's phonics sound /s/ to your child doesn't have to be a challenge.

📣 Phonics Tip:
Use simple visualization activities to foster easy and fun learning in your child. Here we see Teacher Sharon using the 'Slippery Fish' song with iconic props, to enhance the auditory skill of her Starlings level students to make the /s/ sound. Many children prefer taking in information visually over aurally (by simply hearing it). When the teaching instruction combines both elements together, the learning process accelerates significantly.

Learn more of what we develop in our Starlings at: www.ezyphonics.com/starlings

Our Young Explorers are always captivated by Teacher Sharon's lessons! With a comprehensive and ever-changing selection of props, they remain engaged and entertained with our Online phonics classes—while essentially developing the foundational pillars of language learning.

All our lessons are uniquely curated—through carefully designed lesson plans—to be easy-to-grasp, immersive and well-balanced. They are specially developed for one-to-one and small class settings, so that children requiring more support or those who need to be stretched can benefit.

Our Programmes are for children from age 3 till 8:

✔️ Starlings (Ages 3-5)
✔️ Cosmonauts (Ages 5-6)
✔️ Planetarians (Ages 6-7)
✔️ Galaxians (Ages 7-8)
✔️ Customized Intervention Programme

Learn more about premium literacy programmes and what we can offer your child at: www.ezyphonics.com/programmes

Children thrive in an environment which values their uniqueness. At EZY Phonics, we're thrilled to have continued to enrich the lives of each of our students despite the challenges, through our online and home-based learning classes.

It has been a very unpredictable time for all of us. However, we are very thankful that despite all these unexpected challenges, our immersive learning programmes continue to shine through.

We continue to deliver the 4 most-crucial elements of literacy (reading, writing, speech and expression) to children in an ever-engaging and creative way.

Learn more of what we offer at: www.ezyphonics.com/programmes

Discover our All-In-One Reading, Writing, Speech & Role-Play classes in Singapore. We nurture your child to easily achieve milestones through our all-inclusive phonological skills development programmes.

We provide one-to-one home-based or small online group-based classes with a maximum of 4 students per class, for early English literacy that grows with your child.

Learn more of our programmes offering at:
https://www.ezyphonics.com/programmes