The first and most important thing to remember when teaching phonics is that children need to know what sound each letter makes within a word. It is important not to add on the 'uh' vowel sound to the letter (e.g. saying 'suh' instead of 's'), as a lot of people, myself included, were told that the letters made these sounds when they were at school. We learned to read despite this, but learning only the sound makes it a lot easier to learn to blend letter sounds together to read words, and also identify sounds in words to write them.

Children learn in different ways but the three main ways are auditory (learning by hearing things), visually (by seeing things) and kinaesthetically (by relating learning to movement). Most commercial schemes for teaching phonics incorporate all three ways in order to help most children with their preferred learning style. There is usually a picture incorporating the letter which the children learn to recognize and link the letter sound to, a song which includes the letters sound and a movement or action which the children make whilst saying the letter sound.

The second important thing is that at first it is less confusing for the child if you concentrate on only teaching the letter sound, and not its name (/a/ and not 'ay'). This way they are not trying to learn two things at once. Learning the letter names can come later when they have a good understanding of the letters and the sounds they make, by singing an alphabet song.

Thirdly, letters are usually taught first in the lowercase, not capitals. This is because in the majority of books and text the children will be reading, and for their writing, most of the letters are lowercase.

There are free resources available on various sites for helping you to teach phonics, though to get a full range of activities for all the letter sounds can take an awful lot of surfing. For those of you with lots of free time, it is worth looking around.

Different schemes suggest different rates of learning. The UK government in its 'Letters and Sounds' document suggest learning about 4 letters or phonemes each week, starting at about age 5. In the school where I teach, we cover just 1 letter sound each week as most of the children are learning English as an additional language and so need to also concentrate on building vocabulary and understanding.

At the end of the day, it isn't that important how quickly or slowly your child learns the letter sounds. Some children will be able to learn 4 a week or more, and others will struggle to learn 1 a week. This is not something to be overly concerned about and is usually not an indication of how well they will read or perform in school in the future. When they are ready, they will eventually learn all the letter sounds sooner or later and start to read and write. Having helped to teach your child to read is an achievement that in the end you can be proud of.

Lynne Hunt is a primary teacher and mother of three children: Maria aged 17, Daniel aged nearly 5 and Anita aged 3. She has taught now for 17 years, with experience teaching children from 3 years-old to 7 years-old and also teaching English as a second language to children aged from 2 up to adults. She lives in Spain, in Valencia, where she has lived now for 10 years and she has been working in a British School there with great success in developing reading skills among both learners of English as a foreign language and native speakers.

Lynne has recently developed a website to help parents to teach their children to read which you can find at http://www.teachyourchildtoread.net There are many other articles about Teaching Your Child To Read there.